Libbi Gore reflects on a three decade career ahead of new radio gig
She was one of the biggest TV stars of the 90s, until an ill-fated interview with Chopper Read saw her retreat from the spotlight. Now Libbi Gorr is about to return to the airwaves with a new national radio show.
Stellar
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There is a list of top things that can derail you as a person, and it’s fair to say Libbi Gorr has checked off a good many of them.
Towards the end of 2021, the broadcaster, writer and performer reeled from the shock of losing her eldest brother Jon in a sudden accident, and six weeks later she walked away from her beloved job of 10 years as the host of ABC Radio Melbourne’s This Weekend Life.
At the time, she and her family were living with her parents while their home was undergoing a significant renovation.
At least that last item turned out to be a blessing, she now realises. For Gorr, her partner, television producer and director Stewart Burchmore, and their children, Dali, now 13, and Che, now 17, bunkering down with her extended family was just what she needed.
“We were fortunate in that we’re a close family unit because it helped negotiate our way through the grief and bereavement together,” Gorr, 58, tells Stellar.
“Even though there would be six at the table for dinner and the kids would come bounding down the stairs, that always put joy into the house, but it was cushioned in this terrible sadness.”
While a blow at the time, the ABC Radio job loss she labelled her “thwarted ambition” would also prove to be a blessing. Gorr had revelled in radio, especially the privilege of often being people’s only connection point during Victoria’s interminable Covid lockdowns.
She optimistically framed her situation as a career crossroads, rather than the end of the road. “Dad, who’s 90, turned to me and he said, ‘You wait. Those calls will come in,’” she reflects.
As predicted, this year the call came. Gorr is marking her return to radio with a gig as the weekday breakfast host for new digital station Disrupt Radio, launching this week.
Looking back at that difficult time in 2021, though, in the midst of the pandemic shutdown, Gorr remembers, “I had good support around me, so I didn’t stop for a heartbeat.”
She decided to treat the downtime as a sabbatical, embarking on things that would serve to fulfil her: finishing a film script that had been collecting dust for a decade; mentoring journalism students at Monash University; and working “quietly behind the scenes” at creative agency Thinkerbell, a connection that began when she applied anonymously for an internship for people over 55.
Feeling misplaced after leaving the ABC, she had again reached out to Thinkerbell. “I said, ‘I don’t know where I fit anymore,’” Gorr recalls. “‘I’m not Chrissie Swan. I’m not Kate Langbroek. I’m not Elle McFeast. Can you help me with my brand?’ And they said, ‘Why don’t you come to work for us?’”
She certainly wasn’t Elle McFeast. Not anymore. Gorr’s comedic and irreverent alter ego had served her well in her career, becoming a ’90s TV icon as the audacious roving reporter and eventual host of the ABC sports show Live And Sweaty.
She then became the first woman to host a national late-night variety show, McFeast Live, in 1998. Everything was going her way, until Gorr, as McFeast, interviewed convicted criminal Mark “Chopper” Read live on the show when he was just a few weeks out of prison.
He was completely drunk and completely out of her control. Gorr, however, would be the one publicly dumped from her coveted role. And it would take her years to live it down.
“I was cancelled before cancelling was invented,” Gorr recalls, wryly. “I probably lost about three or four years. I didn’t realise I was in a dark place because no-one talked about dark places back then, but I was definitely knocked sideways by it.”
Leaving ABC Radio in 2021 was another challenge to face, but it was met with the “strong foundations”, resolve and sense of self that Gorr credits to her 25-year partnership with Burchmore and their stable family life. She had vowed never again to allow herself to be “dismantled”. “I had a paradigm shift of what was important,” she tells Stellar. “I’m actually a picket-fence girl on a very surreal career ride.”
Gorr is well equipped for making her own way, something she learnt as a child when she realised she didn’t fit the mould of the presenters she saw onscreen. (“From being a little, dark-haired Jewish girl at an Anglican school, there was no room on commercial television for people like me: woggy-looking women with big thighs who didn’t look like Delvene Delaney.”)
And she certainly didn’t need to hustle for her newest gig. Steve Kyte, her former station manager at ABC Radio Melbourne, reached out to Gorr and told her of his new venture, Disrupt Radio, and its innovative focus on business, entrepreneurship and mindset. Or, as she puts it, a station with “a TED [Talk] vibe”. Kyte wanted Gorr as the weekday breakfast host and said she would have rotating co-hosts, the first of whom would be a blast from the past. “Thirty years after we met, Bob Geldof is joining me for the first week”, Gorr reveals to Stellar excitedly. “I’m gonna spend a week with Bob and see what happens.”
When Gorr interviewed the Irish rock legend one Friday night in the late ’90s on Live And Sweaty, she never could have foreseen this. It’s one of many full-circle moments for Gorr, who says she’s ready to reclaim her audience – the ones who loved her as Elle McFeast, and the ones who believe she’s worth listening to as herself. “Sometimes you have to take risks,” Gorr says.
“But I think this is an informed one and I’m willing to give it a crack because, once again, good people are prepared to roll the dice on me. So I’ll give it all I’ve got.”
Disrupt Radio starts streaming online across Australia, and broadcasting digitally in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane on Monday.
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Originally published as Libbi Gore reflects on a three decade career ahead of new radio gig
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