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Wentworth's longest-surviving character seems to have had more sensational storylines thrown at her than knickers at Tom Jones. But is she a saintly survivor, or just a mumbling martyr..?
Love her or hate her, Meg Jackson/Morris was the only character to remain throughout the whole series from episode 1 to 692. Why she carried on working in the prison that long is a bit of a mystery to me, because it was hardly a bed of (he-used-to-give-me) roses. But despite repeated abuse by the inmates, other staff, the system, and the storyliners, she stayed in her job like a good old martyr.
I was initially going to write a ‘top ten’ of once-in-a-lifetime disasters that befell Meg, but soon realised there were far too many. I’ll run through them in order.
1. Meg is held hostage during a riot, and her husband is murdered. At first the killer is unknown, and naturally this causes Meg to behave angrily towards the women for at least five minutes.
2. The murderer (Chrissie Latham) is brought back to Wentworth some time after, forcing Meg into one of those classic unlikely dilemmas of working with her husband’s killer.
3. Her new lover, Geoff Butler, turns out to be a psycho who ends up blowing up Jim Fletcher’s family with a bomb.
4. While supervising Tracey Morris, Meg is shot by a sniper.
5. Meg is poisoned by potty herbalist Evelyn Randall, trying to prove a point about the healing powers of plants.
6. Having married the father of a prison inmate, her new marriage starts to fall apart when husband Bob suddenly starts to disapprove of the job she has been doing since before she knew him.
7. Not wanting to jeapordise the halfway house while giving evidence in court, she ends up in contempt of court instead. This results in her being sent to prison, naturally in the very same one she works in as a 'screw'. Amazingly she was not killed within minutes.
8. Son Marty introduces Meg to his fiancée, who she knows as scheming prostitute Randy Goodlove.
9. Randy is later imprisoned, in the same place that Meg works of course, causing her more improbable professional dilemmas.
10. New lover Jonathan Edmonds turns out to be two-timing her with her best friend, Ann Reynolds.
11. Evil Edmonds hypnotises several of the people in Wentworth, including Meg, making her into an amusingly unconvincing baddie for a short time.
12. Step daughter Tracey Morris turns up at Meg’s house with her boyfriend, holds her at gunpoint and steals all her money.
13. Meg gets obscene phone calls, and is then stalked by a mentally unbalanced friend of her son.
14. Angel Adams is jealous of Meg’s relationship with Phil (Dreary) Cleary, and arranges for her to be violently raped.
15. Meg’s new lover Phil is shot and killed by a mad man.
16. Meg and Ann are tied and gagged in a derelict building full of highly explosive booby traps.
17. She finds she is pregnant from the rape.
18.They discover she has cervical cancer. The emergency operation means she loses the baby.
19. New lover Dennis Cruickshank is arrested as a serial killer of teenage girls, after a library ticket and pair of old tights are found in his car, er, proving it beyond doubt.
20. Frank Burke escapes and holds Meg and Dennis at gunpoint, stealing her new engagement ring.
21. Fiance Dennis is subjected to a violent kneecapping, and ends up in a wheelchair. The use of which seems to automatically result in a character becoming annoyingly moany and whingey (see Tracey Belman). Eventually he leaves her.
Despite this catalogue of shocking and dramatic storylines, Meg is not often the first name that comes up when people talk about favourite characters or events. Strong performers like Val Lehman, Maggie Kirkpatrick and Louise Siverson can make characters and scenes their own, causing them to stick in the memory. Actors who are truly dreadful are also memorable, for different reasons of course. Although not actually bad at acting, I wonder if a usually pedestrian performance was what led to her getting lost somewhere between these two extremes.
So instead of remembering Meg for her resilient character, longevity and dramatic storylines, I’ve ended up remembering her more for her puffball hairdo, her surprising list of male admirers, and her characteristic mumble-at-feet habit whenever emotion is called for. Her most memorable performance seems to be when she was bound and gagged in a building full of explosives, but it isn't usually remembered in a kind way, and seems to be talked about more often than the remarkably good acting performance she gave during the rape attack.
As for the character, she seems to be somewhere between Wendy Craig and Cliff Richard, with a bit of martyr and a lot of mumsiness thrown in. There are people who do like her as a character, and there’s no denying she was very “nice”. It’s just that, for me, I find other characters to be a bit more complex and therefore more interesting (e.g. Vera Bennett, Joan Ferguson, Bea Smith, Myra Desmond, Lou Kelly, etc.) Being nice just isn't enough. If Prisoner were an underwear drawer, those characters would represent the thongs, the silks, and the Calvin Kleins. Meg on the other hand, would be the reliable old Marks & Spencer Y-fronts.
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