Lisa Wilkinson: ‘I may be really good or really bad. I’m about to find out’
IN her first in-depth interview since leaving Channel 9, Lisa Wilkinson opens up on the media storm that followed her shock defection.
Stellar
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AT the height of the media storm over Lisa Wilkinson’s defection from the Nine Network to Ten last October, eight paparazzi lined up along her fence. Packs of them would follow her everywhere, and at such breakneck speeds that Wilkinson saw one almost mow down a lollipop lady. For weeks, she was the country’s biggest story. “I kept thinking, ‘This will stop in the next five minutes,’” she tells Stellar. “Then hours became days and it took on a life of its own. I thought, ‘I don’t want to read any more — I am sick of me.’”
That a job change can trigger the kind of coverage usually reserved for a prime ministerial knifing speaks volumes about the celebrity status of Australia’s breakfast presenters. But Wilkinson’s departure was a story rich in subplots. It became about the gender pay gap; a study of women in our media; and about the prospect of a resurgent Ten under its new owner, US TV giant CBS. But it was also about a 58-year-old woman who’d leapt from her comfort zone into the unknown.
Wilkinson is a veteran risk taker. She had barely any magazine experience when she became editor of Dolly at 21. She was a full-time mum when she began her TV career on Beauty And The Beast, and was, in her words, a rabbit in the headlights. Then in 2007, she took what was then the most toxic job on TV when she agreed to co-host the Today show.
She built her career by taking jobs that should have been beyond her, and turning them into triumphs. Each time, she had little to lose and everything to gain. This risk is different.
This time, Wilkinson left one of the highest-profile jobs on TV for what was — when she signed the deal — an ill-defined role at a smaller network. She will go from breakfast queen to newcomer in a hard-fought, hard-hitting Sunday-night timeslot. She must fit into a well-established format and speak to a very different audience than the one she knew at Today. The move might give her the creative freedom she has long craved and, with CBS’s faith and dollars behind her, turn her into Australia’s version of US journalism queen Barbara Walters — a star in her own right, far from her former co-host Karl Stefanovic’s shadow.
Or it might not. Even Wilkinson doesn’t know. “I’m going to approach this job in the way I’ve approached every other TV job I’ve had. I may be really good, I may be really bad, and I’m just about to find that out — along with the rest of Australia.”
Bargain hunters, take note: now is a good time to trawl through St Vincent de Paul shops on Sydney’s lower North Shore. Wilkinson has devoted the past few months of “gardening leave” to a giant spring clean, and charity bins have benefitted. “That might be a bit of a metaphor for life, actually,” she laughs. “I had my life on hold in many ways for 10 years — it’s just been a wonderfully cleansing period.”
Wilkinson has also been sleeping. A lot. As all shift workers know, chronic tiredness is a bit like being drunk. Reactions slow. Mistakes happen. Emotions are always ready to overpower reason. Wilkinson lived in the fog of fatigue for a decade, and every minute of personal indulgence after 7.30pm — a weekday dinner with friends, an extra chapter of a compelling book — cost her dearly when the alarm went off at 3.30am.
“Combine that with being a working parent, and you tend to find you get through every day as best you can. Near enough is good enough — and it is good enough,” she says. “[But] waking up at an unnatural time does play with your equilibrium and levels of energy. You shut down the stuff that’s tough; you just get through it. It’s not until you are off the treadmill that you realise it’s exhausting.”
She has also travelled. Early in the new year, she visited New York with her husband, writer Peter FitzSimons. Shortly before she left Today, the couple celebrated their 25th anniversary by renewing their vows. Daughter Billi, 20, was bridesmaid, eldest son Jake, 24, was best man, and middle child Louis, 22, walked her down the aisle.
Their first vows were made nine months after they met — heartfelt, but naïve. This time, they knew exactly what they were committing to. “Every marriage is a roller-coaster and to reconnect, you are doing it with your eyes wide open,” Wilkinson says. “It made it so much more meaningful. There is no question mark over whether or not it will last the distance. We are in this through thick and thin. We make each other stronger. We are better together.”
When Stellar last interviewed Wilkinson in May 2017 over a long dinner, she chatted freely about love, and journalism. She was celebrating her 10th anniversary at Today. There was no inkling it would be her last. “I still love doing the Today show and right now I can’t imagine doing anything else that I’d enjoy more,” she said at the time.
Eight months later, meeting with Stellar again to discuss her new role, she is the same charming Wilkinson, with two noticeable differences: better rested, and more guarded. She admits leaving was “something I had been thinking about for a couple of months, and very seriously. The timing was just right. Publicly, it may have seemed like it happened very quickly, but it was something I was seriously contemplating. Then everything just fell into place.”
She refuses to say how long the Network Ten offer had been on the table, or rake over the details of her stalled negotiations at Nine. But within hours of parting ways, an announcement was released that she was joining Nine’s upstart rival. The statement was short on detail, suggesting a deal done in haste. Wilkinson would join the panel of The Project, and “further collaborations... would be announced in coming months”. Since then, Ten has said Wilkinson will anchor The Sunday Project and become executive editor of the yet-to-be launched website, ten daily.
The move took everyone by surprise — with two exceptions. Adam Boland, the former TV executive who appointed Wilkinson as co-anchor of Seven’s Weekend Sunrise in 2005, told Stellar last year that he felt Wilkinson was outgrowing Today. Eight months later, Boland believes Wilkinson’s risk is about to pay off. “She was to some extent in Karl’s shadow,” he says now. “She looked bored to me.”
Having also worked at Ten, Boland thinks the network will be a good fit, with its smaller size giving senior staff more influence. “Lisa will be able to prosecute her own case about the way she wants her career to go in a way she wouldn’t have been able to at Nine or Seven,” he predicts.
That the time was right for a change is a view also shared by Wilkinson’s husband. “Lisa loves feeling challenged, and there was nothing the 12th, 13th, 14th years at the Today show were going to offer that she hadn’t already experienced,” FitzSimons tells Stellar.
Even so, he admits the speed with which it all happened made for a memorable 24 hours.
“Neither of us will ever forget that extraordinary night, when we suddenly found ourselves in the middle of press releases, contract negotiations, paparazzi outside the door, the whole enchilada,” he says. “Lisa ran through the gamut of emotions on the night, but by 2am, when it was all settling down, the final emotion was euphoria, and I am happy to report that euphoria has lasted... with no regrets.”
Her decision also ignited a debate about gender pay parity. “There were lots of reasons why it was time to make a move, and that [pay gap] was part of it,” is all Wilkinson will say about her motives for leaving. “I was very happy that it reignited the conversation, because the gender pay gap is real.”
As the nation dissected the career move — who dumped who? Breakfast presenters are paid how much? — there was a voracious appetite for pictures of Wilkinson. She’d previously been off the paparazzi radar, largely because her marriage of 25 years was seen as less interesting than Stefanovic’s divorce or Samantha Armytage’s singledom. But suddenly, the lenses were all trained on her. It was, she admits, intense and unpleasant. “It’s a weird thing to be the focus of that many cameras,” Wilkinson says. “I thought that first morning, if I went out and gave them a couple of words, they’d get what they wanted. Then it was every single day.
“One bizarre day Billi and I wanted do some shopping. We had three of them [following]. I didn’t realise that they all call each other so if you do some kind of diversionary tactic to drop them, like outrun them at the lights, they’re like, ‘We’ll go down this street and you go down that street.’ It was a bit overwhelming at first. I made the mistake of trying to appeal to one of them — my kids weren’t liking the intrusion at all — but that was a bit of a waste of time, I discovered.”
One photographer shot her crouching next to her car in what Wilkinson says was an attempt to avoid them shooting over her fence. “I thought I don’t want it to look like I am encouraging any of this. There are apparently celebrities that call paparazzi. I am the opposite of that. So when I thought they’ve taken enough shots, this is now getting silly, I thought if I get out on the other side of the car, and stay out of their range of vision, they won’t photograph me. But they were actually shooting over the high fence. I thought, ‘I just can’t win with these people.’ I am at the point now where I just laugh, and just think what a silly waste of everyone’s time.”
As FitzSimons quips, “For about a week, it was like living with a Kardashian.” From time to time, it still is. Last month the couple was photographed heading to lunch with the images published on an online news site under the headline, “Peter FitzSimons TOWERS over wife Lisa Wilkinson”.
“That right there was peak silly,” Wilkinson says. “Apparently it only took 26 years to work out [that he is taller]. I looked at it and thought, ‘I don’t even know if I want to live in a world where that is a headline.’”
Wilkinson admits to some sadness about the way things ended at Nine. “These things are always a learning curve. That’s also really good for you. TV can be shallow, there’s no headline news there, but the relationships that really matter to me are intact.”
She has no advice for her Today successor Georgie Gardner — “she did the show for five years, she doesn’t need advice from me” — and can’t promise to watch her, either. “It depends on whether I wake up in time.”
All eyes will turn to Wilkinson again tonight, when she anchors her first The Sunday Project. There will be more big interviews than on the weekday show, she says, because “people are used to that kind of journalism on a Sunday night”. There will be celebrity, human interest and politics. Its start time of 6.30pm means it is the first current affairs show of the evening, but it doesn’t intend to compete on the same turf as 60 Minutes and Sunday Night.
“It’s a different beast,” says Peter Meakin, who worked with Wilkinson at the Seven Network and is current affairs consultant at Ten. “It’s live. It’s not just doing three or four stories a night. It’s providing news as well as feature stories.”
Reports suggest Wilkinson is being paid up to $2 million by Ten, raising the question of whether the network’s ambitions for her go beyond The Project and ten daily. “[The Project] is my number-one focus, because before I move into anything else, I am going to get this right,” she says. “I feel I have amazing people I can learn from. Carrie [Bickmore] has been there coming up for 10 years. Waleed [Aly] has been there for four or five. I have lots to learn, and I want to do that before I take on any other project.”
Wilkinson says predictable reports of a rift with Bickmore were nonsense. “We’ve been mates across networks. A lot of that goes on — a lot more than people realise. [ABC presenter] Leigh Sales is one of my closest friends. Carrie was one of the first people who called me when it was announced.”
She is also in no rush to win a Gold Logie, despite the frequency with which The Project anchors seem to be nominated. “I think it’s Pete Helliar’s year this year,” she demurs. “We’ve already got two Gold Logies on the desk, and I think Pete’s in the queue ahead of me.”
Her big move was a risk, Wilkinson admits, but it is risks that keep life interesting. “I love when a challenge comes along that I think is what I need to do next. That’s what this felt like. You are never quite sure something’s going to work, and that’s what makes a big change exciting.”
Ahead of her debut, her headspace is made up of “80 per cent hard work, 10 per cent fear, and 10 per cent excitement”.
“Life really is an open book for me at the moment,” she says. “It feels really good.”