Hey Hey It’s Saturday queen Jackie MacDonald quit TV to be a mum, and life has been brilliant

For a generation of viewers, Jacki MacDonald will always be the lively sidekick on the hit ’80s show Hey Hey It’s Saturday. She stepped away from the spotlight to raise her family but has never really slowed down.

Jacki Macdonald is loving life and her role at Eat Street, which she co-founded, that suits her perfectly. Picture: Mark Cranitch.

THERE’S a terrified scream coming from the bottom of Jacki MacDonald’s garden. It’s a screeching, knowing wail of desperation. She goes to investigate, but Jacki’s heard this scream before. It is the heart-wrenching cry that green tree frogs make when they are under attack.

Sure enough, she encounters a goanna dragging a frog out of its tree by one leg.

“And I can hear it going, ‘aaaaaaaaargh’,” she says, her eyes widening, her voice rising, “So I had to run and get the top off the pool filter and dong the goanna on the tail, and go put that frog back.

“But the poor little frog’s leg wouldn’t go back in the …, well, in the …,” she struggles to explain. “It was all …” She grimaces and hangs an arm limply in front of her.

She immediately lets out a rich laugh at the anecdote. “It’s too much isn’t it? Bush life.”

The unassuming, spontaneous ’80s TV icon, whom audiences fell in love with on Hey Hey It’s Saturday, is still amused by the small, crazy, happenstances of everyday life. And she’s still the same crazy, cheeky, loveable character that would foil and befuddle Daryl Somers on the hugely popular national TV show.

While the trademark bobbed hairstyle has graduated from jet black to golden hues, the penchant for flamboyant accessorising remains as large as ever with chunky earrings and a golden brooch shaped as a pineapple.

“It’s divine isn’t it,” the 63-year-old says, looking down at the gloriously green watering-can-shaped handbag she swings beside her as we walk around Eat Street Northshore just before opening time on a Friday afternoon.

Jacki Macdonald is best remembered for her role with Daryl Somers on the TV hit show Hey Hey It's Saturday.

We’re surrounded by the rich smells and sounds of food vendors, who match her enthusiasm with genuine words and big smiles. She’s clearly popular. A woman carrying a wooden crate of vegetables calls after us: “She’s a top woman, that one. ”

Jacki and her close friends, the indomitable restaurateur Peter Hackworth, TV producer John Stainton, and retail entrepreneur John Harrison, started Eat Street in 2013, after Peter was asked by the State Government if she could make a “destination venue of some sort” beside the river at Hamilton.

The venture – which moved a little further downstream last year – has been an outstanding success with more than 70 food vendors, live music, cabaret and an outdoor cinema.

Jacki looks after Eat Street’s social media as well as the on-site gardens and maintenance of a “community spirit”. She strides up to one of the brightly painted shipping containers that have been outfitted as “food trucks”, calling over her shoulder: “These are my French boys. I love my French boys. My cheese boys.”

She holds her phone up to them, playing a video she posted to Instagram the previous week of them scraping melted raclette cheese on to a plate. “7000 views! Do you believe that? 7000? For your cheese!” she laughs with them.

Eat Street founders Peter Hackworth (with umbrella), Jacki Macdonald, John Stainton and John Harrison (right).

Then she’s off again, butterfly-like, stopping at another vendor to order a cup of white tea. There’s no wait, they know her routine and it has already been prepared.

We head around the corner – pausing while Jacki takes a photo of the river and cityscape as the sun slinks into the west – and settle at a cafe table in the Eat Street “laneway” precinct.

Although reticent to give interviews nowadays, Jacki is certainly not the recluse that some people think she is (“Life’s exciting. It’s still full of interesting things every day,” she says).

She stepped out of the limelight to raise her family. But she never really went away.

She still has the two properties she shares with her husband of 35 years, Brisbane dermatologist Dr Michael Pitney – their Sunshine Coast homestead overlooking Sunshine Beach, and the rural property in Brisbane’s western outskirts. Homes where she and Michael raised their children, Lucy, Tom and Emma, who are all now in their 20s and have flown the coop, pursuing careers in various medical fields.

While the kids have left home, their pets haven’t.

“I’ve got a duck and a dog and a cat and a fish and all these horses; so it’s very busy,” she says of her morning feeding routines. “The fish is very important. I inherited it from Emma. She was given this black fish for her birthday when she was about 12. And these black fish – moors – they absorb the bad luck. So the fish gets fed before anybody else, because I don’t want anything to happen to that fish!”

Jacki has always loved her horses. Picture: Russell Shakespeare

The horses alternate between their stables at the Brisbane property and paddocks at the coastal one.

“My kids all rode dressage when they were little and we didn’t sell anybody. I can’t sell people – if you come into my family, well, you stay in my family,” she says. “So I’ve got all these elderly retirement village ponies who I love. They all talk to me. As soon as they hear me coming, there’s lots of voices. I had six, but one just died. Five left and one’s a big warmblood.”

She brings out her phone and flicks through to a video. “You won’t believe this, watch,” she urges.

On the screen, a horse skitters under a shower of water. “This made me laugh. I had to get off the tractor and film it this morning. This horse is standing under the sprinkler, like a kid, playing. It’s like ‘la, la, laaaa’.

“It’s lovely. It’s a great gift to be able to live in the bush with animals.”

Her dear friend Peter, resplendent in capacious ruby red glasses and black robe, has joined us at the table and is nodding sagely at Jacki’s anecdotes. These two have known each other a long time.

“Too long,” Jacki laughs, adding they met at Peter’s French restaurant Scaramouche in the Brisbane CBD some 40 years ago.

“Pete’s 82, you know. She’s setting me a cracking pace. Now when I think, ‘I’m not doing that, I’m too tired’, I think ‘how ridiculous, how am I going to explain it to Peter’.”

Jacki and her good friend Peter Hackworth.

Her friend dismisses it with a small flick of her hand. “You know she gets up early every morning; on her tractor; looks after the animals; the horses; she goes flat out all day.”

“It’s good though, isn’t it?” Jacki grins, “I’ve got a big muscly right arm from throwing the hay over the fence.”

Rural life is how Jacki and her brother and sisters grew up on the family’s livestock property near the central west Queensland town of Blackall. Even when the family later moved to Brisbane, they were still surrounded by cattle and chickens on about 25 acres at Chandler in the city’s southeast.

Her younger sister, Fiona – also a former TV presenter – who now lives in Sydney and works in the wine industry as director of Wine Chronicles, says Jacki is a country girl through and through.

“Give her a pair of gumboots, a pair of floral pants and a tractor to ride on and she’s happy,” the mother of two boys tells U on Sunday over the phone.

“I guess I’m a bit more of a beach bum at heart – so I like to be by the ocean.”

Fiona agrees with the summation that her sister hasn’t changed over the years and is still the happy, hilarious, warm personality that came across on TV screens.

“She is. She’s always upbeat and positive and she’s never really down in the dumps. She gets on with things. If anything hard comes up she’s very good at finding the positive side of it,” Fiona says.

“Sometimes she rings me when I’m walking my dog on the beach here in Sydney and I’m laughing out loud at something hilarious she’s just said.”

Fiona MacDonald and Billy J Smith present It's A Knockout in the mid-1980s.

Both sisters turned their back on the entertainment industry in the late 1980s to start families. Neither regrets giving it up.

“Hell no!” laughs Fiona who was a reporter for Wombat (1983) and co-hosted It’s A Knockout (1985-87) with Billy J Smith.

While Jacki says: “It’s not so much fun being famous actually – much better to be sort of anonymous.” And neither has any regrets about the TV shows they worked on.

“I was lucky,” Jacki says, “I was just in the right shows for me. Hey Hey It’s Saturday was perfect – because there was no formula; you did whatever you liked.”

Fiona says she had “the best fun ever” in TV. “But I think Jacki was much more of a natural talent than I was,” she adds.

When television executives started to tell Jacki she needed to “adapt” her natural talents, that’s when she pulled the plug. From the mid ’70s into the ’80s she managed to be herself, deflecting requests to change, but a stint with Channel 7, and a trip to the US were wake-up calls.

“If you don’t have the ability to say no to people, they will make you do things that you wouldn’t like, which is ridiculous,” Jacki says.

“I never changed. If somebody said to me, you need to change your clothes and wear this, then I’d just say, ‘I’m not doing that’. They’d say, ‘well, Jana Wendt does it’. And I’d say, ‘well, get her because I’m not wearing that’.”

Jackie with Ossie Ostrich in 1986.

She steadfastly believes you have to be true to yourself. Changing people often destroys the original qualities that made them interesting. During her time at Channel 7 she was told she had to sing and dance.

She refused, saying she could neither sing nor dance; when they told her to learn, she refused.

“They said to me, ‘well, what do you do, you don’t do anything?’ I said, ‘I know, I don’t do anything; you’re so right’.

“Even when I went to America, and they said we’d like you to stay here and work on the Laugh-In series; well, the first thing they said was, ‘we love you, you’re great, but you’ll have to change your hair, your clothes and you’ll have to learn to speak American’.”

She quickly decided she should come back to Australia. She was happy with who she was and didn’t “really need to be anybody else”.

Peter leans over and says as an aside: “You know, darling, Jacki should have a chat show like (Michael) Parkinson and interview people who she likes. She would be a knockout …”

“No, don’t listen to her. Pete, God love her, thinks it’s a good idea, but I don’t,” Jacki says.

Jacki Macdonald and Daryl Somers with Kylie Minogue and Ossie Ostrich on Hey Hey It's Saturday.

“I said I’ll pay for it,” Peter replies, addressing her directly, before giving a shrug. “She could do it even now. Parkinson was in his 70s and ...”

“No, no, no, no, no,” Jacki protests.

Peter backs down, but does so with pursed lips and raised eyebrows.

You get the impression that, not unlike the goanna that’s been donged on the head by a pool filter, she’ll wait for another day to try and drag this particular frog out of its tree.

Jacki, undeterred, rolls her eyes and grins. “Oh, look at that cutie,” she cries, distracted as a young couple pushing a pram pass the table, a boxer dog attached to a lead trotting regally behind. She reaches for her phone …