Dr Chris Brown: ‘I’m certainly looking for the one’
Despite constant speculation about his love life, vet-turned-TV host Dr Chris Brown is notoriously private. Now, in a rare interview, he opens up about romance, fatherhood and his mother’s battle with Alzheimer’s.
Stellar
Don't miss out on the headlines from Stellar. Followed categories will be added to My News.
Dr Chris Brown was 25 and had just filmed his very first TV segment for Harry’s Practice when he received a call from his mum.
Anne Brown had been out for drinks with friends, and they had warned her that her youngest son may not be cognisant of the risks faced by attractive young celebrities.
“She said she needed to talk to me about something,” Brown tells Stellar as he leans forward conspiratorially. “Then she told me I needed to be careful because there was such a thing as starf*ckers. ‘There are these girls...’ she explained, ‘who don’t see you for who you are. They just want to be with you because you’re famous.’”
Mrs Brown followed up with a firm message for her son: “Only date people who like you for you.”
Fifteen years later, he can still look back at the life lesson and laugh at how bluntly it was delivered. “Mum never swore,” Brown says. “I hadn’t even been on TV yet! And besides, I don’t think Harry’s Practice was the domain of starf*ckers.”
As he eats a chicken salad in a meeting room where posters of him in his various guises dominate the space — “I’m mortified we’re having to sit in a room with these cheesy publicity photos” — Brown appears to have taken his mum’s warning to heart.
But it’s not that he’s still single, despite being TV’s most eligible man, that makes her nugget of parental wisdom so poignant. Instead it’s what has happened to his devoted mum in the decade and a half since her son became a household name.
Anne Brown now has Alzheimer’s disease. And while the whole nation recognises her tall, blond, smiling boy, she often no longer does.
“It’s a very hard thing to watch someone who means so much to you fade away before your eyes,” Brown says quietly, speaking for the first time about the sadness that’s befallen his family. “I’ve heard it referred to as the long goodbye, and it certainly is. Because she’s still here, but the mum I know isn’t anymore.”
Now 72 and still living at home, she started to forget who her children were about two years ago, a heartbreak made all the more wrenching for Brown because of the long periods he is away for work.
“I can go over a month, sometimes two months, without seeing her so I notice those changes, and that’s the tricky part. This is the biggest challenge our family deals with; it takes the smile off your face sometimes.”
Brown is one of the most popular and versatile television hosts in Australia. He is smart and likeable — and has earned a ravenous fan base that at times behaves as if he is a little bit perfect.
But he also maintains a serious level of privacy and, at the end of a 90-minute chat with Stellar, it’s clear he’s in the midst of some solid self-reflection.
As his The Living Room co-host Amanda Keller observes, “He’s a very layered man. There’s a lot going on with Chris. From the outside it’s easy to think how easy it must be to be Chris Brown. But we all know everybody struggles with something.”
Certainly, Brown has the dream job. Having parlayed his academic smarts into a career as a vet, he became a presenter on Harry’s Practice in 2003 before bagging his own show, Bondi Vet, in 2008.
Americans loved him, ran his show, and last year hired him to travel the world for Animal Planet’s Vet Gone Wild.
In the meantime, he segued from medic to mainstream with gigs across Network 10 — as the geeky foil to Julia Morris’s unapologetic flirt on I’m A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here!; a fixture on The Living Room and a familiar face on The Project.
He won’t be home five minutes from Africa before turning to his next job: as the soon-to-be co-host, again alongside Morris, of Sunday Night Takeaway, a variety show that riffs on one of the UK’s most successful formats.
“It’s warm and entertaining and the whole family can sit around and watch it together,” Brown explains. He says the show defies definition but is full of “undercovers”, which surprise celebrities and the public alike.
As he says: “I’m incredibly grateful, I love what I do and I can’t believe this is my job. When we were filming Sunday Night Takeaway, I was thinking, ‘I get paid to create this.’”
While he doesn’t worry about being overexposed — “I don’t think I’m at that stage, but I’d hate to ever be that person” — Brown’s popularity and constant travelling have come at a cost beyond long stretches without seeing his mum.
Last year he turned 40. And, he tells Stellar, “It surprised me how much it got to me. It certainly made me look at where I am in my life. If you’d told me at 20 I’d be unmarried and without kids, I probably would’ve been horrified. But it’s my doing. I’ve probably prioritised work more than I potentially should have over the past 10 years — to the detriment of my personal life. I love my life, but it’s not without sacrifice.”
He ponders the suggestion he just hasn’t met the right person to settle down with.
“It’s a lot to ask of a girlfriend, to put up with all the travel and the lack of face time. There’s often interest in who I’m dating. I don’t want to put someone through that if it’s not going to be a thing.
“I’m certainly looking for the one. I don’t want to be this person with a history of short to medium-term relationships.”
If, to date, adventure has proved more alluring than love, he suspects fatherhood could anchor him. “I certainly want to have kids and I don’t want to be an absent dad. I know in my heart I’d want to be around for them.”
One TV executive has commented that Brown is a “hard dog to keep on the porch”, but Keller believes he is ready to farewell bachelorhood. Before Christmas, The Living Room’s hosts enjoyed a festive celebration at her house, during which each person’s family came up in conversation.
Keller recalls: “At one stage Chris said, ‘Do you mind? No-one’s mentioned my cat Cricket.’ He joins in on the joke, but he doesn’t want to be that guy forever. There’s a big softie part to him. And he doesn’t want to miss out on that.”
Whatever holds Brown back, it is not unrealised dreams. A keen and talented photographer, his Instagram feed boasts professional-level shots of the multiple destinations he’s visited, along with adorable pictures of the animals he both films and tends.
In fact, years on and a clutch of Logie Awards later, he’s still most fulfilled by being a vet. Sometimes he works in the clinic three days a week; other times he’s not there for more than a month. This year, he suspects, it’ll be a 75/25 split between doing television and being Dr Brown.
“Animals don’t judge you on anything else but your kindness,” he explains. “You’re not beholden to ratings or opinions. What you’re wearing isn’t being critiqued. I get this very strong, deep feeling of achievement and contentment and satisfaction being face-to-face with people and their animals.”
Raised in Newcastle, two hours north of Sydney, and the last of three boys to arrive, Brown briefly dabbled with becoming a pilot until his colour-blindness ruled him out.
His dad Graeme was also a veterinarian whose interest in wildlife extended to family holidays. During a camping outing one summer, the elder Brown put a piece of meat on a string, tied it to a beer can and buried the can with stones in it. The idea was that if a dingo tried to take off with the meat, the can would rattle and wake the family.
Except, Brown recalls, “Dad woke up the entire campsite, of course. [And] the dingo ran off and was nowhere to be seen!”
Keller sees a similar passion in her friend. She tells the story of a homeless man stopping Brown on the street to ask a question about his dog. “He stayed talking to him for hours. He never turns away anyone who has an animal question.”
Still, there’s more to him than just his work. At their Christmas lunch, he brought bread he’d baked himself, as well as lettuce and herbs from his own garden.
“I hope he won’t mind me telling you this,” she adds with a giggle. “He has a frequent shopper card for Spotlight — because if there’s a dress-ups party, he’s been known to make a costume.”
Keller says Brown is a gracious co-host and a team player, while Morris believes they share a certain “magic”. In the early days of I’m a Celebrity, she came under fire for objectifying him for his good looks, but she hit back guns blazing.
MORE STELLAR:
‘The Liberal Party is great for women? LOL’
Daniel MacPherson: ‘I got heckled by Prince William!’
“Dr Chris doesn’t feel put-upon; he’s not scared,” she says. “If he found [the comments] offensive, he’d tell us. He’s a scientist, not an idiot.”
Brown says he was bemused: “I’d written a lot of the jokes, so I was complicit in it. We didn’t mind putting up a bit of a mirror to society and seeing how it felt for the roles to be reversed.”
It is easy to see why they went for it. Brown is unabashedly handsome in an old-school way — square jaw, broad shoulders, long limbs.
He looks like a man who just popped out of the surf and threw on a shirt as he dashed to a modelling job. So he works hard to dispel the pretty-boy persona.
“I struggled to get a girlfriend in high school,” he reveals. And he finds the constant references to his looks a frustration.
“I’d much rather they go, ‘Oh, that Chris Brown, he’s an interesting guy,’ or ‘He’s entertaining.’ I think I offer a bit more than looks.”
There’s another reason Brown wants to be regarded for the work he does on TV — it’s a part of himself he inherited from the most important woman in his life.
“Mum’s biggest passion has always been drama, singing and performance. She’d have loved it if I’d worked for the ABC, but I’m proud that, through performance and hosting, it’s a nod to my mum.”
Conversely, as the mother he knows drains away, it’s the moments when she still sings that he finds most touching. The song she “really gets into” is ‘Wouldn’t It Be Loverly’ from My Fair Lady.
“One of the saddest things about those with Alzheimer’s is how they disengage with the world,” says Brown. “But lyrics to songs are one of the last things to go. If you put music on, all of a sudden her eyes are wide — and there’s joy.”
Sunday Night Takeaway premieres later this month on Network 10.