Mid-2000s Aussie TV was wild. There’s no more whiplash-inducing throwback than hearing the Big Brother theme song, seeing Corey Worthington‘s sunnies or basking in Marcia Hines‘ wholesome vibes.
The same goes for the ads. There are whole communities online dedicated to reliving that era’s nostalgia through commercial jingles.
But one commercial, and one show, stand a head above the rest in my recollection of reality TV from my childhood. It’s a TV show whose veracity is doubted even by my own internal monologue. All I have to go by are the dumb ads which have been branded into the back of my skull.
I’m referring, of course, to Yasmin’s Getting Married.
Who the FUCK is Yasmin and to whom is she getting married?
Whoever she is, these ads continue to haunt me over a decade later. Those weird quips she makes, the era-appropriate backing music, and the the jump cuts of her around the studio are replayed in my head almost every night. These fucking ads. I’m fucking over them.
“I’m getting married!!!!!!!” we hear her scream from the back of a TV studio. Um… congratulations?
I feel as if I have vivid memories of something that never even existed. It’s like Yasmin is a figment of an old fever dream who relentlessly torments those who display any sense of nostalgia for the TV shows of their youth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sr48BELjNa8
I’m just not sure what she wants from us. Were we supposed to be excited for a stranger getting married to someone she hadn’t even found yet?
Yes, Married At First Sight and The Bachelor are huge atm, but back then, none of us cared about seeing some nobody make small talk with a bunch of stray men. To be expected to indulge (and indulge in) Yasmin’s faux-intimacy with a collective simulacrum of a husband was madness.
I decided to do some research before getting worked up over something which may very well have been a fever dream. Turns out: it wasn’t.
Yasmin’s Getting Married, was in fact a very real show, according to Wikipedia and news reports from *checks notes* 2006.
That year in Aussie reality TV had its fair share of ups (Jamie Brooksby winning Big Brother) and downs (Damien Leith winning Australian Idol, absolutely robbing Jessica Mauboy in the process). But Australian Idol politics is a topic for another story. The point is, Yasmin’s Getting Married was a blip on the radar, and that explains why I somehow remember not remembering it.
After just four episodes (out of a planned 40), Yasmin’s Getting Married was axed because it was apparently that bad. With bits and pieces coming back to me, the show’s starting to sound like less of a literal fever dream, and more of a metaphorical nightmare.
Things were doomed from the beginning. The show’s original title was actually Renae’s Getting Married, because the star was supposed to be someone called Renae. She pulled out two weeks before the premiere, and Yasmin stepped in.
The 29-year-old recruitment manager apparently had 5,000 Aussie guys put their hand up to marry her. But we only ever got to meet a handful of them.
The format was simple. In the first episode, we were introduced to six pretty generic-sounding guys: Vincent, Adam, Athan, Max, Peter and Deryn. During the episode, the panel of “experts” whittled them down to three, and then it was up to us to vote.
Except the voting window was 24 whole hours long. Twenty. Four. Hours.
Now that I’m writing this, the memories are actually coming back to me. Yasmin’s Getting Married was boring as fuck.
Because of the way voting worked, no progress was actually made during episodes. Trivial decisions got spread out over days, and viewers such as my young self lost interest.
Yasmin’s Getting Married.
C’mon, Fight me! 😜 https://t.co/OucVNIBCVn
— David Chilcott (@onepotchef) November 27, 2017
So it was boring and got canned, leaving Yasmin at the altar with little more than the saddest IMDB page ever to show for her efforts.
At the time, Network Ten promised to still pay for her wedding regardless. A decent deal, no?
Not for Yasmin.
In a 2014 interview with Nine News, Yasmin said she never took them up on the offer.
“I’m actually a mum now, so I bypassed the marriage,” she said.
“Tradition and Yasmin don’t go in the same sentence.
“I am dating someone, not her father… I don’t know if I’ll ever get married. I’ve given up on the idea.”
That’s a nice outcome, at least. And judging by her comments, the premise of her show wouldn’t even suited her. Perhaps we dodged the bullet of seeing Yasmin getting tied down in a loveless marriage.
But while Yasmin’s short-lived quest to get married proved to be disastrous, there was a silver lining for us viewers: Her dumb show was replaced with Futurama.
For that, Yasmin, we’re grateful.
