OZFEST

Last week I became ensonced yet again in some terribly exciting melodramatic Aussie Soaps. I got some dvds delivered of Prisoner and then Sons and Daughters. Now Prisoner is an obvious choice of viewing for any self respecting mo. It has denim, big brassy women, catfights, evil warders and women in peril in prison. It's the ultimate guilty pleasure. Sons and Daughters is a different genre altogether but yet quite similar.

I wrote about Sons and Daughters at the start of last year as it was always a show I remembered as being very 80s but wasn't completely au fait with all the characters and plotlines, I'm pleased to say that has changed somewhat.

Sons and Daughters starts in 1962 when Patricia and David Palmer turn up at Fiona's house and Pat gives birth to twins. Patricia gets all post natally depressed and whisks herself off with the baby girl leaving David with the son. Cut to twenty years later, Patricia is living the terribly glamourous life in Sydney with her new husband Gordon Hamilton and daughter Angela and some other Hamilton's thrown in for good measure. David meanwhile has a more meagre life with frumpy Beryl, his son John and some other random.

This is when it starts to get messy but basically Angela and John meet up somehow and fall for each other causing the Palmers and Hamiltons to become linked forever again. Patricia is very cold and calculating whilst David is nurturing and loving and altogether boring. Patricia very quickly becomes Australian TV's superbitch and causes havoc with her big eyes and nasty ways. Patricia and the actress Rowena Wallace became a huge success and Pat the Rat is born. Rowena tired of the role and left in a wild plot which saw her in Rio undergoing plastic surgery in a bid to look nothing like Pat the Rat. Jumpo forward about 100 episodes and Belinda Giblin takes on the role of Pat the Rat who has had better cheekbones implanted and lost about 30 pounds and goes by the name of Alison Carr. The viewers know this is Patricia in her new guise and she fools most of the cast for a while but eventually some people find out her secret as she's just as nasty.

Then it gets even wierder - in a bid to boost ratings, producers persuaded Rowena Wallace to return to the show - but Belinda Giblin was now Pat the Rat/Alison Carr. So they made the character of Pamela, Pat's long lost twin sister who had done a stint in jail with Beryl, David's simpering poodle permed wife from two paragraphs ago. Pat/Alison and Pam meet up and end up falling out as Pam's basically a loony. Pat/Alison feels driven away from her home and disappears again only in the last ever episode to be reunited with her first love David who's forgotten everything Pat/Alison did to him that was awful ie - faking her death, sleeping around and he's also fogotten about poodle perm Beryl to be with Pat/Alison.

Phew, that was in depth and that's only one arc of a storyline. I've not even mentioned Wayne Hamilton or Barbara or Caroline Morrell who was terribly 80s with furs and blonde hair and a bitchy line or 4 to utter underneath her lipgloss. And I've also not started on Prisoner yet........ Anne Yates stabbed Bea the other night and Bea escaped from hospital and stayed with Mum Brooks - so exciting!