Sunday Night: Sept 6

Sunday Night is cross-promoting this weekend, with Melissa Doyle interviewing a lifelong friend of Peter Allen a week ahead of its own miniseries. Also an investigation into fertility preservation and a plug for the new Oddball movie.

Frozen Families
It’s being sold at cocktail parties and it’s being promoted and supported by some of the world’s biggest companies as a way of managing work demands and family plans. It’s radical modern motherhood – women freezing their eggs while they wait for the perfect partner or chase the ideal career. It’s already become a billion-dollar phenomenon in the United States and it’s catching on in Australia. But are egg freezing companies selling an unachievable dream of having it all and are employers unfairly leveraging the hopes and aspirations of their female staff? Sunday Night investigates the fastest growing phenomenon in an already booming fertility industry. As more and more women sign up for the program and hand over tens of thousands of dollars for their procedures and storage, there are profound questions about the viability and certainty of the process. Ideally, eggs should be harvested from women in their mid-20s for the best possible chances of a pregnancy later on, but it’s being pitched to clients much later in life when the prospects of motherhood can diminish significantly. In this special report, Sunday Night’s Peta-Jane Madam investigates whether the claims of this multi-million dollar industry stack up and whether vulnerable women are being preyed upon.

Birddog
Forget Happy Feet, we’ve got an entire island of penguins who are deliriously chuffed from their feet all the way to their beaks and who owe their survival and safety to the most unlikely of heroes. One’s a knockabout chook farmer, the other’s a trusty, loyal dog named Oddball. In what is likely to be the cutest story we’ll bring you this year, a rapidly diminishing fairy penguin colony under siege by hungry foxes is brought back from the brink by a determined and practical cocky named Allan Marsh. Swampy had seen his Italian sheepdog diligently protect his free-ranging brood of chickens from the slyest of foxes so when he heard about the plight of the Fairy Penguins on Middle Island near Warrnambool in Victoria, the solution was obvious. Obvious to Allen. Not so obvious to the bureaucracy managing the state’s wild places. Sunday Night’s Denham Hitchcock tells the heartwarming story of how common sense and watchdogs prevailed and this threatened island community got its happy ending. Oh and the feel-good Australian movie of the year, starring Shane Jacobson as Swampy.

Time is a Tale Teller
Peter Allen was one of Australia’s biggest and most complicated stars. His biggest hit told us that love sent him to off to Rio in a frenzy of maracas but we’re going to Armidale, NSW for the real story of the early years that forged this fascinating showman and the love that first captured what would be a wildly wandering heart. Jenny Godwin met Peter when they were both five years old. They lived a few streets apart, went to school and dance class together and became the best of friends. She even has title of being Peter’s first ever girlfriend and they remained friends right until the end. In this remarkable perspective of the gregarious Allen, Jenny opens up to Sunday Night host Melissa Doyle about the bright boy she knew, whose effervescent personality covered the trauma he would experience at home. Allen would become an epic international hit-maker for himself, other Australians like Olivia Newton John, he’d dominate the music circuit in the US and go on to marry ‘the girl with an interesting face’ Liza Minnelli. As Australia prepares for Seven’s spectacular event Peter Allen: Not The Boy Next Door, Sunday Night explores the little known but formative chapter of his life.

Sunday at 7pm on Seven.