Day Robert Duvall blooper changed Angela Bishop’s career

Angela Bishop was ‘toast’ if she failed to get a good line out of her interview with the Hollywood heavyweight, but the result proved just the break she needed.

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Angela Bishop might be about to mark her 30th year at Channel 10, but the long-standing entertainment editor actually made her first small screen appearance on a rival network many years before.

To be fair, the highly-respected journalist, who has interviewed everyone from Oprah to Borat and covered pretty much every red carpet across the globe, wasn’t even born when she popped up on Channel 9.

Channel 10 entertainment editor and Studio 10 co-host Angela Bishop clocks up 30 years at the network. Picture: Tim Hunter.

Before her record-breaking career in federal politics, mum Bronwyn worked briefly in radio and TV and when she appeared as a barrister on a Judge Judy-style program in the late 1960s, she also helped her daughter make her on-screen debut.

“Her first job was at the ABC in radio doing a legal program and then she did a TV show at Channel 9 called Divorce Court where she played a lawyer,” Bishop tells Insider. “She was pregnant with me so my debut on television was actually in-utero.”

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It was a sign of things to come for the younger Bishop who knew from an early age she wanted to be a journalist. She wasn’t yet a teenager when her mind was made up that she would tell the stories of others.

“I hadn’t had any career guidance or anything, it just suddenly dawned on me that that’s what I really wanted to do and I was pretty certain I wanted to do broadcast journalism — radio or television — because I loved that way of communicating,” she says. “I loved the idea of interviewing people and finding out their stories.

Bishop her late husband Peter Baikie and Russell Crowe in Tamworth in 2006.

“I’d grown up in a very politically-aware environment so current affairs was always what was going on around me, it was always very interesting to me.”

After finishing school and getting a political science degree, Bishop applied for two cadetships — one at Ten and another at the ABC. She came close to landing a gig with the national broadcaster, missing out in the final stages, but was successful at Ten.

She sometimes thinks about what may have been had she gone to work at the ABC, but as a believer in fate, knows she got the job at Ten for a reason.

“They’re chalk and cheese really. I’m the creation of a very commercial station and I’m passionate about that,” she says. “I love that about us because 10s always been so innovative, often by necessity because we’re the station that’s been through the toughest of times through the three decades I’ve been there.”

And there have been plenty of ups and downs over those 30 years.

Bishop with friend Nicole Kidman.

Bishop started her time at Ten as a general news reporter, slogging it out on the overnight shifts and covering everything from state politics to crime and courts.

Current affairs then called and she moved through a number of shows that are now well and truly buried in the Channel 10 archives: Sydney with Mike Gibson, a couple of years on Hinch when it moved to the network after being axed from Seven, and finally Alan Jones Live.

Despite these shows each meeting an early demise, Bishop thrived in this type of reporting and had her heart set on a long future in current affairs.

But it would be a story for Jones’ talkback-style show that would help change the course of her career.

The young reporter was sent to New York to interview the stars and director of a new movie called The Paper, starring Michael Keaton, Glenn Close, Robert Duvall and directed by Ron Howard.

As she packed her bags and headed to the airport, the last thing she heard was “if you don’t come back with a good promo line from one of those people, you’re toast”.

“So I’m interviewing all of these people and I’ve never done anything like that before and it’s pretty nerve-racking,” she says.

With mum, former senator and House Speaker Bronwyn Bishop.

When she eventually sits down with Duvall, the two of them hit it off. It helped that Duvall’s good friend was former Ten cameraman Tony Curtis, who he met when the Australian received an invitation to a party intended for his more famous namesake.

Emboldened by their fast friendship, Bishop asks the actor for a favour. “Now that we’re getting on, I’m going to ask you this: Would you say down the barrel of the camera ‘Hi, I’m Robert Duvall and I love the smell of napalm in the morning and I love the sound of Alan Jones in the evening’,” she ask him.

Duval agrees, but there’s a slight hiccup.

“So he does it and says ‘I’m Robert Duvall and I love the smell of napalm in the morning and I love the smell of Alan Jones in the evening’,” Bishop laughs. “I said ‘that is brilliant on so many levels, but could I get you to do it one more time and say ‘sound’ of Alan Jones’.”

The Hollywood legend gets it right the second time around and Bishop had her promo line and a second for the blooper reels. But soon after Jones’ show is axed and Robert Duvall’s newest friend is in reporting limbo.

Impressed by the Duvall interview, Ten’s then head of news and current affairs Carmel Travers suggests Bishop start the network’s first entertainment round. When she baulks at the idea, Travers asks her why.

Bishop with her Bold and the Beautiful co-star (Bishop had a small cameo) Katherine Kelly Lang.

“Because I’m a current affairs reporter and I want to do this, this and this’,” Bishop told her. “She said ‘OK, well if you hate it you can change your mind but why don’t you just try it for six months and see what you reckon’.”

Obviously she reckoned it wasn’t a bad gig.

Bishop, who also insisted her new role included covering the arts, excelled in her new environment of Hollywood stars, red carpets and, reluctantly, the occasional opera.

Looking back Bishop says she’s been fortunate enough to have escaped any hugely disastrous moments with the celebrities she’s met, although there was that one time she was scolded by
Faye Dunaway.

“When I went to shake her hand, she just went ‘Ladies don’t shake hands!’ — it was a five-minute junket and you have to repair the damage,” she laughs.

There was also the time she suffered an uncontrollable coughing fit while interviewing Lionel Richie.

Forced to move into the next room, she had to pass the music legend hand-written questions.

“I actually had to give him the questions and he had to look at the blank chair where
I would be sitting and pretend I was asking him and he did it so he’s always been a dear legend for doing that,” she says.

Amelia was a ‘blessing’ to Bishop and Baikie, the journalist says.

Since waving goodbye to her current affairs career more than two decades ago, Bishop has interviewed a list of stars way too long to publish, but one that spans generations and has on it the biggest names of film, television, stage and the arts. They include Audrey Hepburn, Barbra Streisand, Sean Connery, Robin Wil­liams, Britney Spears and Drew Barrymore are just a few.

But it is the evolution of Nicole Kidman, who she now calls a friend, that has been one of the highlights of her career so far.

“I first met her on the set of BMX Bandits when we were both teenagers — she of course was the star and I was third extra from the left of the waterworks,” Bishop laughs.

“She’s been such an amazing interview, it didn’t matter if it was tough times or a couple of years ago when she was winning every award known to man for Big Little Lies.”

Away from the jetsetting and her newer role as a co-host of Studio 10, Bishop is a mum and one who is now raising her daughter Amelia, 11, single-handedly after the death of her husband Pete from a rare form of lung cancer in 2017.

It has been 18 months since Pete’s passing and mum and daughter are doing the best they can to process and heal from the loss.

“I don’t know if I can be objective enough to take a look at us and know how we’re going,” Bishop says, adding that Amelia was a “blessing”.

The Studio 10 co-host has reported from her fair share of red carpets and awards shows around the world.

“She was wise beyond her years even before this happened and she’s funny and she’s instinctive and we were so blessed to have her,” she says.

When the pair organised a charity fundraiser on the first anniversary of Pete’s death, Amelia stunned her mum when she stood up and spoke from the heart to those in the crowd.

“She said ‘This is exactly the right thing to be doing. Dad always told me that while the drugs he was on mightn’t help him, they might help the next person who gets this so we’ve got to keep fighting’,” Bishop tearfully recalls. “The whole place just dissolved into a mess of tears.”

Bishop draws on the strength shown by her husband during some of his darkest hours.

“I try to have gratitude wherever possible because that’s how Pete went through things,” she says. “He’d be going in for day six of hideous bloody chemotherapy where the people around him are dressed like Homer Simpson going to work in full radioactive garb because whatever it is they’re about to inject into him is so poisonous they have to be dressed like that and he’d be going ‘but we’re lucky, really’ and he’d point out some reason why we were and that’s a good way to do things, to turn around and think of reasons to be grateful so that’s the way I’ve been handling it.”