Larry Emdur makes outrageous pledge if he wins the Gold Logie
Larry Emdur is up for his first Gold Logie on Sunday and he’s so sure he knows the outcome, he’s made a truly extreme pledge.
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Larry Emdur is so confident he won’t win the Gold Logie, he’s made an extreme pledge if he does end up being crowned.
“I’m so confident I won’t win, I’ll happily get all the nominees name initials tattooed on my arse on the Morning Show live on Monday [if I do],” the Channel 7 presenter tells news.com.au.
His doubts are understandable, given Emdur’s debut Gold Logie nomination this year doubles as his first Logie nomination. Ever.
That’s despite the 59-year-old hosting popular TV shows for more than 30 years on shows like The Price Is Right, Wheel of Fortune, Hey Hey It’s Saturday, and more recently, the ratings juggernaut that is The Chase Australia.
Before his plethora of hosting jobs began in the 90s, Emdur plied his trade as a cadet journalist at Seven, where he earned the impressive title of ‘Australia’s youngest ever national newsreader’ when he was tapped to present the overnight news aged just 19.
The Morning Show co-host remembers the honour with slightly less reverence.
“There’s a bit of a twist to that... it’s been slightly misrepresented over the years, but it was an overnight shift that no one wanted to do,” Emdur says.
“For me, I wanted to surf all day, so I was like, ‘OK, I’ll do the overnight shift’. And that gave me the title back then as the youngest national newsreader.”
It was still quite a meteoric rise for the young Bondi-based Emdur, who a couple of years earlier was working as a paperboy for Fairfax.
“My jobs were emptying ashtrays for journalists, cleaning coffee cups, running to get bacon and egg rolls on the overnight shift for the journos, running copy around,” he remembers.
“There’d be young reporters from Channel 7 working overnight, and they’d race out to cover a fire, or a car accident, or something exciting. And they’d always be telling me about their exciting lives while I was busy emptying ashtrays.
“So it was the crappiest early entry job, but I wasn’t in there to be part of the media. I really just wanted to surf all day.”
That was, until a journo gave him a tip-off on the graveyard shift one night, suggesting he rewrite an existing article about crime in Bondi and offer it to a community newspaper in a bid to get a coveted byline.
“I was bored, and that’s what young journos were doing to get stuff in print,” Emdur says.
Hitting the typewriter, he coined his very first article, the ‘The Bondi Crime Plague by Larry Emdur’, and slipped the handiwork under the door of the Bondi Spectator’s office.
“They were only doing bowling reports, commercials, adverts and stuff. So they weren’t big on news. And I just wrote a note saying, ‘I’m interested in getting into the media. Dear editor, could you let me know what you think of this?’,” he says.
“That was a Monday, and Mum came into my room on a Thursday morning, woke me up and said, ‘Is this you?’ And [there it was] on page 3.
“So the next week, I stole another story from the Sydney Morning Herald and rewrote that, and then that appeared on the front page.
“Then I just kept doing it. I kept slipping these stories under the door at 6am on my way home. I never even met the guy [the editor].
“So, I was a reporter now. I was basically stealing stories, but I was a journalist. I thought, ‘This is unbelievable’.”
From there, a teenage Emdur hit up Seven newsroom editors over the skeleton-staff festive period, offering to “carry a tripod” just to get his foot in the door at the broadcaster. It worked.
On his first day on the job as an intern, which fell on Christmas Eve, Emdur encountered his very own guardian angel in the form of late New Zealand musician Ricky May, a fixture on Aussie TV in the ‘60s.
May, who later died of a heart attack in 1988, took Emdur under his wing for his debut on-the-ground assignment at a local Christmas concert, and helped him produce a story that would make it to air.
May was singing at the Wayside Chapel community centre in Sydney, performing Christmas carols that reduced the old men in the crowd to tears. Emdur remembers it as a “really beautiful story.”
“We got back to the newsroom and they managed to cobble together a story with me in it on my first day on work experience.
“I put that down to Ricky May. He just picked me out his crowd and went, ‘Follow me. I’ll make a story with you.’”
It was a pivotal moment before Emdur’s eventual promotion to national news reading, and it also opened his eyes to the kind of storyteller he wanted to be.
“It triggered a yearning to do nice stories,” he says.
“There were lots of journalists in the newsroom who would love the crime stories, they wanted to be first on scene at the fire or the murder, and that just wasn’t me.
“Because I was in the newsroom, I’d get sent out to political stories and car accidents and murders and shootings and all sorts of things, but I was a kid, so that had a huge impact on me.
“I really worked hard to get to the end of the news, the nice light story at the end, which is where I really found my happy place.”
Viewers who tune into The Morning Show, which Emdur joined in 2007, can no doubt vouch for that: He and co-host Kylie Gillies are renowned for going off-script and infusing fun wherever appropriate.
Emdur was most recently handed the reins to The Chase Australia after troubled former TV host Andrew O’Keefe’s contract wasn’t renewed.
Emdur has managed to continue the game show’s dynamite viewership since taking the helm, where he’s repeatedly managed to pip prime time shows in the ratings despite his 5pm timeslot.
Priding himself as a man who “never says no”, Emdur admits he almost broke that motto when he was initially offered the role.
“I was very nervous, and it was decision that I sat on for a while,” he says.
“I wasn’t convinced, and I’m the guy who hasn’t said no to anything in 40 years. But I’m getting to that age now where I probably don’t want to work harder. I have a very cool little lifestyle and I’m home every day with my wife [Sylvie] for lunch. Our kids are growing up, and we love it.”
Ultimately, the man who never says no didn’t want to start now.
His involvement in The Chase has Emdur right at the heart of what makes him tick, why his favourite yarn was a feel-good story with Ricky May on Christmas Eve all those years ago, making people smile.
“People come up to me all the time, and they’ll say, ‘When I was a kid, I used to go to grandma’s house after school, and I’d sit with nan and we’d watch The Price Is Right together’,” he says.
He continues, “And I know now a lot of people aren’t as into game shows, but I really do hear stuff like that regularly. The game show genre has touched everybody at different times of their life. And that’s very special to me.
“They’re happy and entertaining, but informative at the same time. That’s certainly what The Chase is for many people, and I love that that’s part of someone’s day and part of their connection in their family.
“We often say when we make TV that we’re not saving lives, but then you get letters from people – I got a letter a month ago from a lady who has stage four cancer – and she loves watching The Chase every night. It just takes her away from everything.”
And yet, Emdur still stands by the Logie prediction he made earlier in our chat.
“I feel confident that I won’t be getting a tattoo on my arse on the Morning Show,” he says.
The TV Week Logies airs on Sunday at 7pm on Channel 7
Originally published as Larry Emdur makes outrageous pledge if he wins the Gold Logie
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