Legal dramas sees teen pregnancy catch-up documentary pulled from ABC
WHATEVER happened to those teen mums from Sydney’s west from that original award-winning documentary series of Plumpton High Babies?
You won’t find out tonight, with the ABC pulling the one-hour Plumpton High Babies: 10 Years On from its schedule at the 11th hour.
The ABC said the show has been postponed “due to a late legal matter that needs to be resolved’.
“The ABC apologises for the inconvenience caused by the late change and a new date for broadcast will be announced soon,” it said in a statement.
The Director of Plumpton High Babies, Aviva Zielgler, said she hoped the show would be seen “very soon” on the ABC.
“I am so sorry they won’t be seeing their stories told and their voices heard tonight. But I do hope their lives, and Glenn Sargeant’s commitment to giving them every opportunity through education with a school program that supported them and their community, will nevertheless still be seen very soon on the ABC,” she said.
The last-minute shelving came after a blaze of publicity ahead of the scheduled broadcast.
The postponed show comes more than a decade after the original series highlighted the lives of eight pregnant teenagers involved in the Plumpton High School’s Young Mother’s program.
It revisits three of the young mums, now in their mid to late 20s, as well as Mr Sargeant, who set the program up, after becoming “sick and tired of walking through shopping centres and seeing young girls with babies in strollers, obviously not going to school”.
It reintroduced three of the original participants: Jacinta, Simone, and Baby.
“It is only on returning to the complex realities of the girls’ lives today that we see how much they and their children have at stake. All now have more than one child dependent on them; and each is at a significant turning point,” publicity documents for the catch-up said.
Mr Sargeant received an Order of Australia for his work helping teen mums stay at school in 2004, the same year he retired, but the school program has since been dropped.
“It didn’t last after me,” he said in a recent interview.
“And that’s very, very sad.”
Originally published as ABC pulls show in last minute controversy