Morning TV star Melissa Doyle opens up to Bryce Corbett about her parents’ divorce, being raised by her dad and the brush with illness that caused her emotional breakdown.
At the end of 2008, Sunrise presenter Melissa Doyle disappeared mysteriously from our living rooms. One morning, she was there on our TV screens, her vivacious smile and infectious personality radiating across breakfast benches all over the nation, the next, she was gone.
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For six weeks, she went missing. No explanation for her absence was given, no reason was offered up. The show went on without her, as the TV machine is wont to do – but the undisputed star of morning television was too busy, too distracted and too distraught to notice.
Melissa Doyle’s life had been turned upside down. She had been plunged into a kind of personal hell the likes of which she had never experienced before. She suffered, in her own words, “a total breakdown”. “I just completely fell apart,” she remembers now. ‘I’ve never talked so openly about any of this – you’ll have to bear with me.”
Out of the blue and completely without warning, the happy world of television’s sunshine girl had been shattered. It’s not for nothing that Mel Doyle is the reigning queen of breakfast telly. When most of us are bleary-eyed, unkempt and either shuffling about in pyjamas, wrestling with recalcitrant schoolkids or rushing out the door to work, the 40-year-old TV presenter is a picture of poise and composure.
In the bubblegum universe of Sunrise, where segments on tsunamis are juxtaposed with next season’s nail colours and where everyone and everything is perpetually perky, Mel and her electric smile puts the sun in our early morning rise.
A winning combination of authority and accessibility, a clever mix of coquettishness and homeliness, plus looks that are at once model-impossible and girl-next-door, have made Ms Doyle morning TV gold. Yet, for someone who is in our lives daily, little is known about her. For a person who makes a living asking questions of others, she’s done a convincing job of evading them for the better part of her high-profile life – until now. “I’ve never been comfortable talking about myself,” she confides. Yet she has such a compelling story to tell.
When Mel Doyle was two years old, her parents, Robert and Virginia, divorced. From the age of two to 11, she spent weekdays with her mum and weekends with her dad. It was her “normal”, just as it is the everyday reality of many thousands of Australian children with divorced parents. In this age of “blended families”, so far, so unremarkable.
Then Mel’s mother remarried and decided to move from Sydney to live on a farm halfway between Cooma and Canberra. Mel spent six months down on the farm, commuting to Canberra every day for school, before she started pining for Sydney, her friends and her father. She moved back to the big smoke and went to live with Dad. It was the early ‘80s. She was about to hit puberty and she was throwing her lot in with a man who – sensitive and loving as he undoubtedly was – was a child of the 1950s, who had been raised on a beef cattle farm in northern NSW. And so, in the face of convention and against all odds, a two-person, self-contained, atypical family unit was formed. It was Mel and her dad versus the world.
Your say: What do you think of Mel Doyle? Do you watch Sunrise? Share with us below.
Read more of this story in the September issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly.
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