At the venerable age of 70, having survived Depression and war, there is no doubt that The Australian Women's Weekly is one of Australia's grand dames. It seemed right, then, that she be honoured on This Is Your Life (Thursday, Nine ).
It was something of a departure for the series, which normally honours the lives of individuals, and one which, in hindsight, did not entirely work.
The magazine was born in June 1933 in a 44-page, black-and-white format, published in NSW. It cost tuppence. By the end of its first week, sales had exceeded 120,000 copies. By 1939, as we emerged from the Depression, that had built to 400,000 copies.
The women who featured in the magazine were, or would go on to become, extraordinary role models, such as Australian pioneer aviatrix Nancy Bird Walton who made an early, and memorable appearance on Thursday night. (Give this woman a TV show, please.) One of the magazine's writers, Adele Shelton Smith, was the first accredited female war correspondent. Indeed, these were groundbreaking times for the sisterhood.
But what made the story of the Weekly, and with it the fantastic first half of this television retrospective, so fascinating was that this really wasn't the story of a magazine at all. What we were watching was the story of Australia in the 20th century, albeit seen through the Weekly's eyes.
The iconic cartoon strip Mandrake, printed for the first time in full colour in the Weekly's pages, the sexual revolutions of the 1950s, '60s and '70s, the contraceptive pill, the somewhat curious anachronism of sponsoring a tour by a Christian Dior designer and the national bake-off in the same year, and our fascination with the royal family, peaking during the Queen's Australian visit in 1963 (the souvenir issue sold 1 million copies) all loom large on our cultural landscape.
Mike Munro emceed proceedings with effortless charm he's a first-class performer while the stream of guests hit their mark: the supremely stylish Maggie Tabberer, entertainer Denise Drysdale, tennis champion Evonne Goolagong Cawley, swimming champion Dawn Fraser, housewife superstar Dame Edna Everage, media identity (and former Weekly editor) Ita Buttrose, and the list goes on.
Into that lovely mixture, Luciano Pavarotti was rather awkwardly plonked, wishing the Weekly a happy 70th birthday with all the enthusiasm of a man reading a cue card. Come on, Luciano, I thought to myself. Once more with meaning.
Of course, no discussion of The Australian Women's Weekly would be complete without the magazine world's covergirl of covergirls, the late Princess of Wales who graced a slew of its covers. The magazine's deep fascination with royalty is famous, and few royals commanded the magazine coverage that Diana did.
Which is just about where proceedings seemed to come unstuck. Her memorial seemed unnecessarily maudlin after all we were celebrating the Weekly's milestone and to follow it with David Campbell, exhorting the eulogical When She's Gone in his hardest rock voice to a studio audience which was just about as white bread as TV gets, was plain dumb. Wrong song, wrong singer, wrong audience.
Campbell was followed by Jean Kittson's Candida, apparently representing the '80s were they really this bad? Her excruciating, long-winded performance was thankfully trimmed for transmission.
And just when you thought proceedings couldn't make any less sense, leggy Rhonda Burchmore clacked onto stage to close out the show with a big band musical number. Curiously, for a woman whose singing voice is only slightly more famous than her long legs, she didn't seem to do much singing. There was feather-fluffing, and a lot of that Marilyn Monroe-esque look-at-my-legs-while-I-walk-up-and-down-the-prop-stairs striding, but the best part of the vocal effort seemed to come from Burchmore's tuxedo-clad co-star.
And just what it had to do with The Australian Women's Weekly was anyone's guess, but you could be forgiven for thinking that you had switched channels and hit a rerun of the Logie Awards. And not the good Logie Awards, either.
In the end, it was just frustrating, because the program's examination of the '80s and '90s was flimsy, ignoring the achievements of Australian women during those years, and lacking the elegance that was afforded to previous decades.
It clumsily exchanged the This Is Your Life staples of guests and anecdotes with cheesy tributes and musical numbers, though it could be argued that both somewhat appropriately reflect those decades, on television at least. Perhaps, in the end, the joke was on us.
Ruth Ritchie is on leave.