Seven to screen Jimmy Barnes documentary

Seven Network is screening Jimmy Barnes: Working Class Boy feature documentary on Monday, October 1.

It will be two days after Barnes and the Black Eyed Peas play the entertainment at the AFL Grand Final in Melbourne.

Working Class Boy opened in cinemas last month to critical acclaim and with the biggest opening ever for an Australian documentary, overtaking the opening of Bra Boys in 2007.

The film also had the biggest opening for a documentary since Michael Jackson’s This Is It in 2009.

It hit 220 screens and reached almost $500,000 over its opening weekend, and over $750,000 to date.

Directed by Mark Joffe (Jack Irish, House of Hancock, The Man Who Sued God), the doco is produced by CJZ with principal funding from Screen Australia, with the assistance of Create NSW.

It is based on Barnes’ memoirs of the same name, tracing his beginnings in Glasgow and moving to South Australia where the family pattern of domestic violence, poverty and alcoholism.

The book won the 2018 ABIA Australian biography of the year, spent 16 weeks at the top of the best-seller list, and sold 250,000, making it one of the biggest autobiographies in Australian history.

It sold ten times more than previous Barnes biographies.