Deb Knight: ‘Georgie and I are not schoolgirls in a schoolyard’
In an exclusive interview, the Today show’s Deborah Knight rejects claims she and fellow host Georgie Gardner don’t get on and sets the record straight about rumours she has to keep her hair a certain length.
If Deborah Knight wanted to refute suggestions that she’s the hardest working woman in television, then she perhaps shouldn’t have chosen a Friday in which to do it.
When she sits down to chat with Stellar at 2pm, she’s in the middle of a split shift, having already worked for seven hours on the Today show, including an extra hour on air for a breaking news story in Melbourne.
After our interview, she’s back in the make-up chair ahead of another four hours of researching and reading the afternoon and evening news bulletins.
When she clocks off around 7.30pm, she’d like to go and watch her husband play in his band, but there’s the small matter of organising a babysitter for the kids.
“All journos are hardworking,” she says, instantly dismissing the notion that she’s any more industrious than her colleagues.
“Everyone who’s worked with me in newsrooms over the years would know that I throw everything I possibly can at every job I do.”
After being overlooked, first at Network 10, where she lost her newsreading role to Sandra Sully, and then on Today where both Sylvia Jeffreys and Georgie Gardner were promoted ahead of her, this year has seen Knight finally land the plum role many believe she has long deserved.
Snaring the seat vacated by Karl Stefanovic was always going to generate interest, particularly when Nine Network executives made the unprecedented decision to have two women helm its flagship breakfast show.
But if five mornings of gruelling breakfast television wasn’t enough, Knight has also held on to her role reading news bulletins on Friday and Saturday evenings, prompting speculation she’s keeping her options open if the new Today line-up doesn’t work out.
“I reject that it’s a safety net,” she says emphatically. “I really love doing both and I think they complement each other. The age of having journalists just presenting one bulletin is gone. Everyone is versatile. I’m working six days a week, but it’s not as if I’m here all day [on] those six days.”
If Knight’s seven-year tenure at Nine had her positioned more as a support act, her promotion to the headlining gig has brought with it not just greater status but more intense scrutiny.
Inexplicably, breakfast television hosts are second only to reality-show contestants when it comes to appraisals of both their personality and pairings.
In other industries the promotion, on merit, of two women to the top roles might be seen as innovative and progressive, but for audiences still in their pyjamas there’s a suspicion of change.
Knight says she watches the ratings because it’s the daily gauge of the show, but she doesn’t take the comments to heart.
“A lot of it [the commentary] was just hateful and you have to ignore it. The first day we were on air, we hadn’t even completed the first show and articles were appearing online writing us off and saying ‘This is a dud.’ It was silly and unfair. I realised I couldn’t control any of this, but what I could control was doing the best job I can.”
She’s taken a similar approach to conjecture that she and Gardner don’t get on and are locked in a battle for the top spot.
“We’re not schoolgirls in a schoolyard,” she points out with barely concealed exasperation. “We’re professional people and it shouldn’t matter that we’re two women. It disappoints me that has to be the focus.”
While much of the narrative has positioned the pair — both blonde, both in their 40s — as locked in a catfight, they each say nothing could be further from the truth.
“Georgie and I have enormous respect for each other,” says Knight. “We’re very different people, but I think that’s a good thing because we bring different approaches.
“In some things, though, we’re fundamentally similar. The other morning they changed our scripts so they were in bold print and since we’re both frugal, we were concerned about how much extra ink was going to be used.”
Gardner wryly points out that the “catfight” stories probably come from “the same sources who predicted a female line-up would be preoccupied with discussing feminist rallies, tampons and tuckshop duties”.
She appreciates there’s been a readjustment for viewers but hopes they’ll ultimately find the show refreshing and progressive.
“If people feel that because it’s two women that we couldn’t possibly get on and we need to be pitted against each other, then that’s a sad indictment of where we are at as a society,” Gardner tells Stellar.
“Deb and I like and respect each other enormously. I couldn’t be happier sitting alongside her.”
Indeed, before executives made their final decision, they sought Gardner’s opinion on potential co-hosts. Knight remembers her colleague telling her that she was her pick.
“I was very humbled that she would want to work with me so when they [Nine] went down this route, I thought it was terrific they chose the best person rather than having to have a man and a woman,” says Knight. “It was a real thrill.”
In an industry that is increasingly populated by “stars”, Knight’s stock-in-trade is determination and dedication.
She’s ambitious but collegial, focused yet flexible, and is admired by her colleagues for her “directness and integrity” (Gardner) and for being “a cracking operator and person” (fellow news anchor Peter Overton).
She’s no show pony, gratefully entrusting her on-air image to the fashion and hair and make-up teams, though she happily ditches the frocks and face paint minutes after the cameras stop rolling.
As she says: “I couldn’t care less what I wear and I couldn’t care less what label it is.” For her chat with Stellar she’s fresh-faced after a midday nap and wearing the comfy jeans and unironed T-shirt befitting a busy working mum.
If Knight has a facility for the stories that are at the heart of good television, it’s because she’s lived through plenty of her own.
Raised by her mum after her father was killed in a hang-gliding accident when she was just one, she credits her work ethic to her upbringing.
“My brother and I were raised in a housing-commission area that was very stable and wonderful, but there were no extras,” she reveals.
After school — “I was a total goody-two-shoes” — she went to university and started her journalism career at a radio station in Wagga Wagga, in regional NSW, before moving to Sydney where she was employed by the ABC to cover rural news and then host Landline.
An interview with then Prime Minister John Howard caught the eye of Network 10 who hired her to work in the Canberra press gallery, before posting her to the US bureau where she covered the September 11 attacks and the war in Iraq.
With that sort of pedigree, she felt her future at Network 10 should have been assured, but in 2011 she was suddenly axed after 13 years.
“I was blindsided. I had no idea it was coming,” she says. “I’ve never coasted in my career, but it’s a volatile industry, which is why you have to be versatile. It’s why I keep doing radio — you can’t fall back on traditional thinking that you just need one skill.”
The sacking was all the more shocking because it came just as Knight and her husband Lindsay Dunbar, who works in news graphics, were recovering from a two-and-a-half-year battle with infertility.
The couple went through 12 emotionally and financially draining rounds of IVF and endured a miscarriage before finally welcoming their son Darcy, now 10.
When daughter Elsa was born 20 months later the couple, who met when both were working in Canberra, couldn’t believe their good fortune, but soon after Knight found herself unemployed.
“I was really thrown off course when I struggled to have children,” she says quietly. “I’d see women with babies and I was so steeped in sadness thinking that wasn’t going to be my life.
“I’ve faced hurdles in my life and I know thingscan be taken away from you both professionally and personally. Look at my mum, she had a young family and ‘boom’, it [her security] was taken away. You can never take anything for granted.”
Knight is not precious, but she’s also not a pushover. Following the Al Jazeera sting on One Nation’s senior party officials, she was granted a last-minute interview with Pauline Hanson in Brisbane.
With just an hour to get to the airport, there was little time for grooming, much to the chagrin of some of the audience.
“Don’t worry about her Deb!” commented one viewer. “Focus on fixing your hair cut. Bloody shocking.” Knight called it out, screenshotting the comment and posting it on her own Instagram.
“I know it’s a visual medium, but sometimes the substance is more important than the style,” she wrote, reminding Stellar she responded similarly when a viewer commented that she was “repulsive” for being pregnant on air.
When life in television is turbulent and capricious, Knight has the good fortune of a stable and nourishing home life.
After the struggles of IVF, the presenter was more surprised than anyone when she fell pregnant naturally at 42. Daughter Audrey is now three and “an absolute gift, complete character and ratbag”.
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Ever the journalist, Knight rang her fertility specialist afterwards to ask how it could have happened. “I was absolutely gobsmacked, but I was told they really don’t know a lot about fertility.”
While Knight has inherited her mum’s stoicism she also credits her husband with keeping their home life running smoothly.
“He’s a hands-on dad and he’s very flexible in rolling with the punches with me,” she enthuses. “He’s exceptionally supportive, but he will tell me if I’m taking on too much.”
Recently the pair both accompanied one of their children on a school excursion, but Knight was equally delighted when their au pair baked an elaborate rainbow cake for daughter Elsa’s eighth birthday.
As the make-up chair calls, Knight grabs a chocolate brownie and heads off to have her hair styled. Is it true she has to keep it either shorter or longer than Gardner’s?
She bursts out laughing: “No, there’s no directive. It’s thin, so I’ve had it short since I was in high school. I leave the style to those who are far more talented at these things than me!”
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