Fatty Vautin finally getting respect he deserves after demise of Footy Show
FORMER Footy Show host Paul ‘Fatty’ Vautin will be taking little pleasure from the cancellation of his show that in the end couldn’t be saved by a host who never played the game, Annette Sharp writes.
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HAD TV bosses gone down on bended knee, kissed his freckled feet, doubled his salary AND thrown in a set of swanky Mizuno golf clubs, long-time host of Channel Nine’s The NRL Footy Show Paul “Fatty” Vautin still likely would have rejected an 11th-hour plea from Nine executives to return to the helm of the program he’d help make one of the nation’s most popular sports variety/talk shows for two impressive decades.
At least that’s what close sources claimed last week as loyal fans of the program started baying for replacement host Erin Molan’s blood following the axing of the long-running program.
Vautin has maintained his silence since Nine’s CEO Hugh Marks and sports boss Tom Malone failed to front up — or even have a conversation with him — before having an underling sack him in remote circumstances in 2017.
That phone call to Vautin, then on holidays in the US, finally came from his direct report on the show, the program’s then EP Glenn Pallister, under instruction from management.
Pallister was also tasked with the thankless job of sacking Vautin’s sidekicks Beau Ryan and Darryl Brohman, later hastily re-employed by Nine, before finally, and honourably, with nothing left to do at Nine, Pallister sacked himself.
MORE: ERIN MOLAN’S NEW DEAL AFTER AXING
As stunned mainstream media checked the program’s quarter-century statistics last week and discovered Vautin can lay claim to a television record — he is the longest serving host of one program in Australian television history with 24 consecutive years in the job — Vautin sadly declined this newspaper’s invitation to comment on the axing of the show that for decades made millions of Australians laugh as “Fatty Fatman” Vautin and co-hosts Peter “Sterlo” Sterling, Steve “Blocker” Roach and Paul “The Chief” Harragon mixed serious rugby league panel discussion with hilarious dress-up segments, studio competitions and live music.
“At their prime,” said the program’s founding executive producer Gary Burns, who was restored as a consultant to the program for the final 2018 season and is now looking for a new challenge, “ … they were rock stars. They weren’t The Beatles, no, they were more The Monkees. but they were huge.”
The hosts at one time even had their own groupies — hardly the high class sort but still memorable enough for this columnist to recall eager female fans (and a maybe one stray wired-looking male) being turned away from Nine’s Willoughby studios back in 1990s when I working at Nine as publicist of The Footy Show — perhaps a column for another day.
There was a time when television in this country was run by men with truly obscene amounts of testosterone coursing through their veins. Under them, television was run like a team sport. Sure, a men’s sports where women had only a minor role to play, but a game with an unbendable set of rules.
And one of the hard rules was that when a coach sacked a player who had given his heart and soul to the team and the game, sometimes in full make-up as Kiss’s Gene Simmons, sometimes in drag, frequently doing things he didn’t want to do in front of a national audience, the coach fronted up in person and sacked the player himself or got on the phone.
Vautin, who remains under contract at Nine as a league commentator, is understandably still sore about the way Nine treated him.
He was robbed of a chance to say goodbye to his fans on The Footy Show floor.
Yes the ratings for the show have been in decline since the introduction of Thursday night league matches. Yes some of the jokes had grown tired. Yes Vautin had grown older along with his audience … but for a long time he and Sterling and Roach and Harragon made a lot of money for Nine, won a lot of Logies and went well out of their comfort zone to make Australians laugh.
Fatty will derive little pleasure from the cancellation of his show that in the end couldn’t be saved by a host who never played the game.
But hopefully he’s feeling the respect of the TV industry and rugby league code at last.