PR queen Roxy Jacenko’s dream of reality TV stardom fading fast
PR queen Roxy Jacenko looks to have run out of options for snagging her own show with the Ten Network expected not to take up a follow-up season to last year’s profanity-laden pilot, I Am Roxy, entertainment columnist Annette Sharp reveals.
Opinion
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Roxy Jacenko’s fourth shot at reality TV stardom — or sixth if you count news coverage of her husband’s 2016 insider trading trial and her televised lumpectomy on 60 Minutes that same year — may soon be counted as her latest misfire, with the Ten Network expected not to take up a follow-up season to last year’s profanity-laden pilot, I Am Roxy.
Ten refused to confirm industry talk it has already canned Jacenko’s fly-on-the-wall program which, among its many sins, showed her plucking the nose hair of her husband Oliver Curtis.
“No decision has been made,” a Ten spokeswoman said on Friday when approached about the future of the polarising half-hour reality show, only one episode of which ever made the light of day.
It’s the same response the network gave the series’ production partner Matchbox Pictures back in October following the program’s September 2019 debut.
But at least Ten isn’t using the COVID-19 crisis to hide behind any decision it’s made to scrap the show — in stark contrast to Jacenko herself, who last week cried poor to media about the downturn of her once-lucrative PR business.
Confirmation that Jacenko’s business is facing tough times has been a long time coming from the high-energy spin doctor whose cosmetically corrected smile is the envy of real estate agents and luxury car spruikers from here to that sweaty international global dental tourism hotspot Bangkok.
Last week Jacenko said she lost 85 per cent of her business in a 72-hour window due to the outbreak of coronavirus.
And as clients departed, so too have some of the young staff who idolise and emulate Jacenko, almost exclusively young blonde women, who now join a long line of former Sweaty Betty employees, some of whom have previously blown the whistle to media about their unhappiness working for Jacenko.
“I feel a sense of relief, as strange as it sounds. I have been chained to my desk through my husband’s jailing, my children’s first days at school, a battle with breast cancer and never been able to step back and take a breath — I feel like this is my time to do that. I have decided that I would rather have my sanity than another fast car or Hermes bag,” Jacenko told media, words that added further salt to old wounds across town.
Jacenko, whose much-flaunted wealth has for years flown in the face of the changed market conditions observed by her rivals, has consistently used reality television to position herself as one of Sydney’s top PR operators.
Some of her fiercest critics claim the brash Jacenko even did this with her husband’s insider trading trial — seizing it as a promo platform for herself.
For a decade, reality television has been instrumental in helping Jacenko establish her brand — and it’s a brand she’s devoted more time and love to than any client that’s paid her to boost their profile and profits.
She saw the potential in the reality TV medium in 2010 when she persuaded the Seven Network to follow her around for proposed reality series The Sweat Shop, based on US show The Hills.
Seven cancelled the show during production and the show never saw the light of day.
She took a second swing at the reality TV genre with greater success after being cast on Nine’s The Celebrity Apprentice in 2013, where she emerged as the villain to Stephanie Rice’s battered victim. Rice won the series and the love of the nation, Jacenko did not, though she did win the respect of program’s host Mark Bouris, a personal friend.
In the years that followed, Jacenko went after other opportunities for her dream of celebrity stardom with the single-minded intent of a hungry raptor.
Foxtel would pass on her pitch to again reinvent The Sweat Shop and gave Jacenko a wide berth when casting its Real Housewives Of Sydney — something the businesswoman likely assumed she’d be perfect for.
Ten, which denies Jacenko partly bankrolled its pilot, was the last free-to-air broadcaster to take a chance on Roxy and now that I Am Roxy looks to have been consigned to its reject pile, it appears Jacenko may have finally exhausted all options on the local television front — unless SBS and the ABC can see a place for her in their plans — something she knows will impact her declining business further.
Luckily this will leave her free to do exactly as she last week said she would — spend more time with her husband and children at home, in lockdown, like the rest of us.
We can only hope there isn’t a fixed camera on the wall of her Vaucluse house capturing it.