David Penberthy: Sorry, George. Your apology is hard to swallow
Former Masterchef judge George Calombaris is just one of many fallen stars to have used the TV “tell-all” in a bid to restore their reputation. I still didn’t feel sorry for the guy. None of us did, writes David Penberthy.
If George Calombaris was a recipe ingredient, you could liken him to the poor rabbit in that wonderful Greek dish, stifado.
Calombaris has been chopped up and allowed to stew in his own juices for an eternity as a result of a protracted national scandal over his underpayment of staff, and his increasingly desperate attempts to restore his shattered reputation.
This slow burn was made possible by the fact that Calombaris did it not once, but twice, and has now had two increasingly unconvincing shots at contrition.
The first when news broke a couple of years back that he had underpaid his people by about $2 million, the second and worst when it emerged last month that it was still happening anyway, and the real figure was actually $7.8 million.
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It is a staggering amount of money not to notice. As many have said, if it was the other way around, and the staff were in the process of stealing a million bucks, two million bucks, or indeed a whopping $7.8 million from the boss himself, you would have thought he’d have been all over that one in a jiffy.
Calombaris’ character has been further damaged by his unpleasantness towards a young football fan at an FFA game, for which he was convicted and fined $1000.
On top of that, the emergence from within the Ten Network of the inner wranglings and ultimate shredding of his already eye-watering MasterChef contract only cemented the perception that George is ultimately in it for George.
The cumulative effect of all this is that George Calombaris — whose commercial and media success was always driven by his likability — is now regarded by many as a pretty ordinary sort of a bloke.
I wrote all this not as a Calombaris hater but a one-time admirer and long-time MasterChef devotee. Especially in its early years, the format and content of MasterChef was a breath of fresh air. It was the ideal family show in that it was positive, nurturing and educational.
Much of its interest and appeal came from Calombaris himself, then a young gun chef who had come from nowhere on the Melbourne restaurant scene, whose food was neither prissy nor pretentious, but a hugely innovative extension of the Mediterranean food culture he was blessed to have been born into.
And now we are here, where almost an entire country now regards him with suspicion, if not disdain.
It was against that backdrop that he faced the nation on Wednesday night, sitting down with Leigh Sales on the ABC’s 7.30 to convince us none of this was a sinister or self-interested process, but the result of poor management, being stretched and frazzled, failing in a human way to ensure the right systems were in place.
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There have been plenty of moments during the past decade or so when fallen stars have used the media “tell-all” format in a bid to restore their reputation.
Like the post-sex scandal Tiger Woods, or the Olympic champion Grant Hackett on 60 Minutes after the swimming star’s spectacular blow-up with his former partner, Calombaris tried to make virtue of fronting up on 7.30, no doubt with plenty of help from the sidelines from a PR adviser who wouldn’t have come cheap.
The question is: did it work?
Is George Calombaris genuinely remorseful, or is he just trying to save his business from going up the spout?
As we have done so often with MasterChef, we sat down as a family on Wednesday night to watch Sales put Calombaris through his paces.
It was intense television.
That moment when Calombaris put his head down, unable to speak, struck me as real emotion, not some confected attempt to engender sympathy by breaking down on national television.
I still didn’t feel sorry for the guy. None of us did.
My daughter put it best when she said: You almost feel sorry for him. Almost, but not quite.
I think the reason for this cynicism came down to Calombaris’s repeated reference to his own staff as being the people he was now most worried about.
“Don’t punish my people,” he said, over and over again. “I love the people that have worked for me and I don’t want them to suffer right now.”
These are, of course, the same people who in many cases were forced to suffer financially due to his own ineptitude.
Now, they’re being held up belatedly as the very reason we should all keep marching through the doors of the Press Club or whatever other restaurant venture he has on the boil.
These answers sounded too much like a plea from the owner to maintain his existing level of bookings, and less like a sincere cry to make sure that the people he left almost $8 million short could still make an honest living knocking up sauces or drying the plates.
The genuinely disturbing thing about the interview is how manic Calombaris is.
If I were his mate, I’d be worried for the guy.
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He is obviously a workaholic, and perhaps it was his single-mindedness about the quality and continued expansion of his restaurants that made him take his eye off the basics.
He seems determined to work harder now than he ever has, almost to enslave himself to restore his former good name. He is even about to embark on a new restaurant, although the launch date has been put back by the scandal.
The last thing this bloke needs is a new restaurant. He needs a break.
He’s still got plenty of dough in the bank. What he needs more than anything is a food truck, with a couple of staff who he can pay on time and in full.
And to take a deep breath and get back to what it was that first instilled a love of cooking in him, before it became the mega-business that he was clearly ill equipped to manage.