What TV star Amanda Keller wishes she had said to her late mum
Television and radio star Amanda Keller reveals the emotional strain of seeing her boys fly from the nest and why she sees turning 60 as a privilege.
Stellar
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Amanda Keller remembers clearly one of the low points in the many years she and her husband struggled to have children. After months of injections, general anaesthetics for egg harvesting and the news that yet another embryo had failed to take, the couple decided to see a movie to distract themselves from the sadness and disappointment.
They went to see Notting Hill with Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant and, as Keller reflects, it couldn’t have been a worse choice.
“We’d just done another IVF cycle that hadn’t worked and suddenly we’re watching this couple on a park bench and she’s hugely pregnant,” she tells Stellar. “I remember thinking, ‘Why is everyone’s assumption that love equals babies?’”
Twenty years on, as she waves her eldest son, Liam, off to university and oversees younger son Jack’s last year at school, Keller is feeling understandably emotional that the children she fought so hard to have are now flying the nest.
Constantly mindful that others on the IVF journey don’t come home with babies, she remains tangibly grateful to be a mother but that doesn’t mean her sons’ arrival into adulthood isn’t bittersweet. In fact, as she and her husband Harley Oliver dropped 19-year-old Liam at university, she was reminded of the blasé attitude she herself had of leaving home.
“I’m so excited for Liam but I’m nostalgic for me,” says Keller, 59.
“I was listening to The Chicks song ‘Wide Open Spaces’ about a mother dropping her daughter at university, and it made me miss my mum who passed away 17 years ago. I wanted to say I was sorry because I didn’t blink when I left and it made me want to cry.”
Busy with her breakfast radio show and with the 10th season of Network Ten’s lifestyle program The Living Room about to hit our screens, Keller believes hers is the first generation to talk about how it feels when your children leave home.
“My mum didn’t have a career so when we left home that was it,” she says. “At least I have other things to occupy myself with and I talk about it a lot with my friends.”
She’s spoken previously about how having sons is like the longest break-up in the world, a severing that she says will be made worse if Jack, 17, also decides to go away for university.
“To have a house without our kids in it just seems extraordinary to me, so I’m going to have to tape Jack’s legs to the chair to keep him here a bit longer! Sometimes I look at toddlers at the beach and think what I’d give for a day of holding their hand at that age again.”
Whether it’s her genuine nature, cracking wit or deft intellect that wins over fans, what’s clear is that Keller is universally beloved in a media landscape where key players are often polarising.
Her willingness to tackle tricky subjects with personal insights – she spoke openly on radio about the issue of consent in light of the recent sexual-assault claims in Parliament – and the warmth she generates with her co-stars on The Living Room make her a crowd favourite even if the Gold Logie has eluded her two years running.
She believes that viewers warm to The Living Room, particularly in the pandemic era, because it offers a visual and mental respite from all the troubles in the world.
She also credits the connection with her co-stars, Dr Chris Brown, Barry Du Bois and Miguel Maestre, for giving the show a depth and authenticity.
“The part of the show I love is when the four of us are slagging each other off and loving each other in equal measure. We’re a very tight, sincere unit and if anyone comes up to me to talk about The Living Room they say they feel like our friend, too.”
Keller recently had her co-hosts over for lunch and says it felt just like “family”, with Brown strumming along with her son Jack on their guitars, and assorted kids in the pool. They will undoubtedly also be there when she celebrates her 60th birthday early next year, a subject she wants to discuss rather than shy away from.
“I reckon it’s a big deal to say [I’m turning 60],” she tells Stellar. “I’m so lucky I got the opportunity to be in an industry where it would normally all be over by now. Particularly with radio, I wake up every morning and I can say what I like. I’m allowed to have an opinion, I’m valued – and how lucky I feel for all of that.”
She also regards ageing as a privilege. “As we get older, we realise we’ve lost [some friends] early and some we’re losing now, so it seems churlish to me not to embrace getting older because aren’t we lucky? That said, some mornings I look in the mirror and say, ‘Go easy on yourself, you’re nearly 60.’”
She pauses: “OK, I’ve been saying that for five years.”
What she’s really hoping for is a sponsorship deal with the shoe brand Kumfs, pointing out that she’s the perfect person to spruik comfortable footwear. Recalling her 50th birthday at the local bowling club, she says she staggered home afterwards, apologising to her husband because she was wearing uncomfortable shoes. “You know you’re carrying them?” he told her.
What with the demands of work, kids growing up and the limitations of COVID, Keller says she and Oliver marked their 30th wedding anniversary last year with a dinner of sausages at home, but she’s quietly delighted that their relationship has withstood the test of time.
“I feel great pride and a sense of surprise that we’ve suddenly turned around and it’s 30 years,” she says of her husband, a well-known television writer and producer, who’s become a successful artist.
“Harley is still the smartest and funniest man I know and I’m really proud of the two great humans we’ve created.” Nevertheless, she’s quick to point out that, like any couple, they have occasional tensions.
“We don’t argue much but the other day I was cranky and couldn’t open a jar and I snapped at Harley. Jack heard it, so afterwards I talked to him about how I’d spoken to his dad and resolved it. They need to see that adult relationships can have snappy moments but it doesn’t impact on how you feel about each other.
“With pop culture and Married At First Sight, you see the drama but you don’t see all the richness of the middle bit, and that mucky stuff is sometimes harder to negotiate.”
It’s this wisdom that clearly underpins both Keller’s professional success and personal contentment. Every weekend she walks her dog with a friend who’s a forensic psychologist, and she loves to bake, saying she finds relaxation in the rhythms of measuring and stirring.
The prospect of becoming an empty-nester unsettles her, but it also prompted some deeper conversations with her dad, Arthur, who is 87.
She recently thanked him for helping fund her life after she left home, and that conversation prompted him to speak of his regrets at travelling home from boarding school and immediately going off camping for a week with his mates rather than staying at home with his parents.
As Keller says: “It had haunted him as an adult how that must have felt for his mother, so we’re never too old to feel the sting and open our hearts and say, ‘I get it now.’”
Keller pauses and then, switching hats from philosopher to comedian, she laughs out loud: “Life is really just one long country-and-western song, isn’t it?”
The Living Room returns to Network Ten at 7.30pm on Friday.
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Originally published as What TV star Amanda Keller wishes she had said to her late mum
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