A 30-second commercial costs more than $A25,000 on United Kingdom prime TV, but it is worth every penny when millions are glued to their sets watching one of the most likeable and brilliant actors around, the irrepressible Martin Clunes, OBE.
You may know him as Gary Strang from Men Behaving Badly, or as Martin Ellingham in the ITV drama series Doc Martin. Now imagine him reaching tens of millions of viewers in England and Australia in a 10-minute segment promoting our own backyard, and it hasn’t costed us a cent. And then there are the re-runs of the re-runs.
Welcome to his new documentary Islands of Australia featuring Mundoo Island, one of only 12 islands highlighted in a three-part series to be shown on ITV in the UK and on Channel Seven later this year. It’s priceless.
The special follows his highly-successful Islands of Britain series in 2009 which gained huge ratings internationally, and Colin and Sally Grundy, and their children, Jessie, 14, and Jack, 12, still cannot believe Martin, 54, and his wife, Phillipa, and their daughter, Emily, 16, stayed with them at their Mundoo Island station during the filming over Easter.
Incredibly, after an exhaustive selection process, Mundoo Island, via Goolwa and Hindmarsh Island, was the only island in South Australia chosen for the series, and it topped Martin’s personal list because he instantly became excited at the prospect of mustering wild horses with Arabian bloodlines that roam freely here.
It should not have come as any surprise given that Martin is president of the British Horse Society, but according to Sally, he and Phillipa, who is executive producer of Doc Martin, were also “blown away” from the spectacular beauty of Mundoo Island and the Coorong, and absolutely stunned by the nature and especially the birdlife upon their arrival.
They stayed in two-storey self-contained guest accommodation near the homestead overlooking the Murray Mouth and Coorong and Mundoo barrage, and were joined by the producer, assistant producer, an Australian cameraman/sound man and Martin’s personal assistant.
“We took them to Grannie’s Hill, the highest spot on Mundoo Island, at eight o’clock in the morning to get drone footage from straight over the sandhills to the sea, then turned it around and captured the most magnificent footage coming back over Mundoo Island,” Sally said. “It was just sensational.”
When Martin and the crew heard of Rob Virgo, an amazing 79-year-old character from Middleton who ran off with the circus at 13 and has been breaking horses on Mundoo Island for years, they knew they had to get him on the scene.
So off went Martin, Rob and Colin riding into the proverbial sunset past a herd of a thousand-or-so Angus beef cattle and 300 Dorper sheep amidst the croaks of rare Southern Bell frogs and the raucous of even-rarer Orange Belly parrots across 3000 acres, and Sally noted that Martin had mentioned he was having the time of his life. You could see it on his face. “He was like a kid in a lolly shop,” Sally said.
The adventure continued beyond dusk with campfire scenes. “We hardly stopped filming the whole time they were here,” Sally said. “We rushed home for lunch which the kids got ready for us.
“For Mundoo Island, it means a lot; now we will be out there on the world stage. It was interesting to see Martin’s reaction, and that of Phillipa, as they were mind-blown by the vista of the Coorong. They see a lot of the world, and they said the Coorong was just magnificent.
“Martin and Phillipa were gobsmacked by what we are trying to do on the island environmentally as well as running it as a station without any staff. They care about nature and seemed thrilled when we told them that we planted 140,000 trees two years ago because we wanted to introduce native species to enhance the environment, and how we do a lot of surveys for Birds Australia to get a good indicator as to how the environment is going since the millennium drought.
“There were a lot of little things that took special effort to put this segment together, like Martin needing to bring his own helmet, needing insurance so he could go horse riding and getting drone approval to obtain footage, but it will all come together beautifully.
“But overall, this became more than just about a television documentary; it was about two families from opposite sides of the planet who had never met and bonded so well. It was discovering how a brilliant actor is so opposite to the part he plays in Doc Martin, someone who’s a character in real life with a wicked sense of humour. He’s very down to earth, naturally funny and caring. A very likeable larrikin really.”
Maybe we should claim Martin as an Aussie like we did with New Zealand-born actor Russell Crowe, but perhaps before anything we should call Mundoo Island our own before the rest of the world sees it as their treasure. Amazing; the place is in our backyard yet generally few know anything about this place. At least you can watch our Martin tell us about it on TV.
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