Annette Sharp: Vikki-Barnaby TV love story like a plug for a turgid soap opera

THE Seven Network has thrown the baby, the brunette and the bullwhip in with the bathwater and dialled the drama up to 11 ahead of tonight’s extended interview with Barnaby Joyce and lover Vikki Campion, Annette Sharp writes.

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YOU’VE heard the melodramatic promo … Beef-breathed voice-over bloke: “Their illicit love affair rocked Australia.” Vikki Campion: “Everything was worth it for this … (sobs)”

Voice-over bloke: “Now Vikki Campion comes clean.

Campion: “You can’t help …. I couldn’t help it. You can’t help who you fall in love with.”

Barnaby Joyce: “I failed, I failed, I failed, I failed, I failed.”

Sounding and looking more like a plug for a turgid episode of soapie The Bold And The Beautiful than for a hard news story, the Seven Network has thrown the baby, the brunette and the bullwhip in with the bathwater and dialled the drama up to 11 ahead of tonight’s extended interview with former deputy prime minister of Australia Barnaby Joyce and the woman he’s blown up his life for, the contraceptively challenged Vikki Campion, his former media adviser.

Barnaby Joyce and his former media adviser, now partner, Vikki Campion. Picture: Kym Smith

The mini-drama, which runs about 40 minutes, ticks all the boxes on American screenwriters Beau Willimon (House of Cards) and Shonda Rhimes’s (Scandal, Grey’s Anatomy) drama staples checklists.

The story has scandal, sex, political intrigue, a clandestine affair, an anguished abandoned family, high-level government meddling, a desperate flight from media, some impressive hair and a lucrative television payday.

But the deal, for $150,000, could actually represent great value — as a stand-alone reality TV docudrama rather than a news story — or might if it pulls an audience of more than one million viewers nationally in five capital cities.

To make the point an industry source revealed Channel 9 and its production partners pay between $800,000 and $1.2 million per episode for its popular drama series Doctor Doctor.

More ambitious specialty drama productions such as Foxtel’s six-part Picnic At Hanging Rock cost $3 million dollars an hour to produce due to higher production standards.

Joyce has been slammed for accepting $150,000 for the TV interview. Picture: Supplied/Channel 7

When compared to these budgets, the Barnaby-Vikki love story is a cheap investment for Seven, a network that negotiated to pay convicted drug smuggler Schapelle Corby a reported $400,000 for her jail release story in 2014 before going cold on the deal after Seven’s offices were raided by federal police searching for evidence the payment would make Corby a recipient of proceeds of crime.

“Barnaby is destroying his life and blowing up his career for $150,000,” one former crack television negotiator said on Friday.

“He has sold himself out cheap.” Or his girlfriend has, if Joyce’s statements last week regarding Campion striking the deal are true. Production standards on Sunday Night’s exclusive interview are, if not cheap, certainly minimal.

The former deputy premier says his partner was the once who accepted the money for the interview. Picture: Supplied/Channel 7

Shot on location against a leafy autumnal backdrop in what looks like the star’s hometown, pretty country Armidale — but isn’t — perhaps due to the couple’s new-found obsession with privacy, the star of the docudrama, new mother Campion, 33, looks to have done her own hair and make-up.

Luckily for Seven, Campion is attractive, a fact that will bolster audience numbers as the public is more predisposed to the public “stonings” of attractive women over less attractive ones.

Sadly Joyce is not much to look at. He’s no Michel Gill, the actor who plays US President Garrett Walker in House Of Cards. He’s not even in Frank Underwood’s class but what he lacks in physical appearance he compensates for with political clout and there will be some who switch on tonight just to see if the former deputy prime minister dumps a bucket on Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and members of the National Party to which Joyce is aligned.

Joyce is no Michael Gill, who plays US President Garrett Walker in House Of Cards. Picture: Netflix

The drubbing of the PM is probably unlikely. Turnbull’s mate is Bruce McWilliam, a lawyer at Seven who also sits on the media company’s board, and a man well placed to keep a look out on the PM’s behalf — precisely the sort of character a House Of Cards screenwriter would have a field day with.

So what can viewers expect in the interview, which Seven is guarding greedily until its 8.33pm timeslot?

There will be tears, confessions, an admission of infidelity, hand-wringing, possibly an apology to the family Joyce left behind and a watered-down version of the salacious affair that has tantalised journalists since last October.

There will also be the odd tender caress between not-yet-divorced father-of-four- daughters Joyce, 51, and his younger lover and an introduction to six-week-old baby Sebastian, the infant who briefly threatened to destabilise a government.

How the interview finishes we can only guess, but Joyce, as his Sunday Night interviewer Alex Cullen confirmed last week, dreams of his political restoration and his eventual return to the front bench — something that would have been more likely had he taken a firm position and refused to participate in this soap opera interview.