Love will keep us together
As she launches a reboot of dating game show Blind Date, Julia Morris tells Genevieve Gannon why her husband Dan is still her perfect match.
Kissing is complicated enough when you are a teenager – Does he want to? Do I want to? How do we do it? But what happens when, as a clumsy 15-yearold, you try to steal a hesitant “pash” on your first date with a boy and you suddenly realise that you’ve snagged your metal braces on his? The answer, says comedian Julia Morris, is shock and then total panic.
“I kept thinking: ‘Eew, EEW! He’s putting his tongue in my mouth!’”
Julia, 49, recalls of her earliest traumatic attempts at romance.
But ask Julia about true love and her tone changes completely. “Dan was my matching half from night one,” she says of husband of 13 years, Dan Thomas. Despite her reputation for extreme romance – there’s a lot of lunging and dry white wines in her affaires d’amour – her marriage to Dan is a “ballast” of love and support built on a foundation of deep friendship. “He’s ruined my stand-up for man bashing because it’s not really true,” she says.
Over the years, Julia has been candid about their bond, the challenges they have faced, and how they doubled down to get through the bad times together. Through an ectopic pregnancy, Dan’s breast cancer diagnosis, and the challenges of raising two girls while Julia was flying hither and thither for work, they kept their sense of humour. But they also recognised when they needed some help steering through rough seas. They both see a psychologist for “tune-ups”. And recently the couple took a dancing class to “rediscover the fun” – which worked far better than either of them expected.
For the next few weeks, Julia would find herself walking past her husband and feeling the old, thrilling attraction return. “It was like: ‘oh, I forgot to notice you’,” Julia says.
Given all this, it’s no surprise that when Channel 10 commissioned a reboot of match-making game show Blind Date, they wanted the ebullient Lady J-Mo to host and guide the lovelorn contestants through the thorny forest of love.
“It’s an odd environment to find the love of your life, so humour makes people feel more comfortable about that,” Julia says. The comedian and actress says she’ll be writing a lot of the material herself, hopefully with the help of some of the writing team from I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here. She’ll draw on her own experiences but is expecting the contestants will provide much of the fodder.
“I always start with overnight romance and see if it folds out from there. It’s probably not a great way to go forward,” she says. “I think a lot of the questions are designed to get funny answers like, ‘If you were a spirit animal, where would you do your poo-poos?’”
She says if she were to find herself a contestant on a dating show now, she’d try to reverse-engineer the process to ensure she ended up with Dan. “I’d want to hear humour, to hear them making fun of themselves. I’d want to hear gentility. I’m trying to think of Dan’s qualities and work back from there.”
Love at first song
Julia and Dan first clapped eyes on each other at an Aussie expat weekly get-together in London called Club Sunday. “Alcohol would be rising like a spirit level in their eyes and I would probably be out the front chucking, to be fair,” Julia says. Dan was on his way to a gig, but someone grabbed him, shoved a microphone into his hand and pushed him onto the stage. Julia knew Dan was one of the few eligible men in her circle, but had him on the backburner. Her interest amounted to a vague thought of: “Ooh, I must kiss you on the lips at some point.”
But then he wowed her with cabaret. Most straight men in his position would be expected to sort or mutter, “er, Goldfinger” before trying to shuffle into the background but Dan clutched the microphone and belted out GoldFINGEEERRR. (Here Julia gives an excellent imitation of a man imitating Shirley Bassey.) “And I thought: ‘Who is that?’” Julia says.
Unfortunately he had to run to a stand-up gig but they reconnected at the Edinburgh Festival, and after a little overnight romance, fuelled by the notorious dry white wines, they lived happily ever after.
“I have a great girlfriend called Fozzie and a great girlfriend called Meg and over the years I thought: why can’t I find a boy who’s a combination of Fozzie and Meg?” Julia says. “Dan is that boy, that person you can’t wait to get home to tell the story to.
“As the years go on and you’re raising children there has to be a real ballast of best friend there. Because if anything is going to blow it apart, it will blow apart from having kids. If he ever wants to entice me into la boudoir, he just has to unpack the dishwasher. Nothing starts mummy up like all the washing done. Oh you sexy man.”
Keeping love alive
Despite the prevalence of dry white wines in Julia’s anecdotes, these days she would barely have an alcoholic drink from one end of the year to the other. “I’m a chucker,” she says. So she and Dan have to find creative ways to entertain themselves on date night. “If you’re not two drinkers that are out there, then what do you do? How do you reconnect?”
Julia says.
They decided on dance classes but as the first lesson approached, Julia, the busy actress, performer and mother, found herself dreading it. “On the first day I was like, ‘I’ve got to go to that bloody class’.” But when she stepped in front of Dan, she says, something transformative happened.
“There was this intense moment, because I don’t remember the last time I’ve stood opposite my husband and looked him in the eyes when he feels vulnerable and I feel vulnerable, and you’re restrictively touching each other, there’s this reconnection moment.
“You’re having to move and mirror each other’s body, you become aware of that person. The only time you’re aware of that person is if they’ve emptied the dishwasher or not. So we stopped talking about who picked up the dry-cleaning and started talking about our hopes for the future, or where we see ourselves … those conversations you never get around to. It was like slow-mo in a film.”
It’s an odd environment to find the love of your life.”