Brutal backlash killed Mick Molloy Show in eight weeks

Mick Molloy was riding high after his hit radio show. It took eight short weeks to crash back to earth when he launched his own TV show.

The critics were not kind to The Mick Molloy Show.

Mick Molloy has reflected on the brutal backlash to his eponymous show which was axed after eight weeks on air and savaged in every section of a broadsheet newspaper.

“I remember the edition of The Age … I’ve got it, still wrapped in plastic, because I was actually slagged off in every section of the paper,” Molloy told the Herald Sun’s Sacked: Showbiz podcast.

“I was on the front page, then page three, there’s a big picture of me somehow looking like I’m behind a cage, like I’m in jail. That wasn’t good. That directed (readers) to the entertainment section, which went bonkers.

“Then, in the sports section, one of their journalists used me as an example of how poor players play,” Molloy said.

“I remember thinking, if I’d had a car for sale, the motoring section would have described it as a shit box.”

The Mick Molloy Show, a sketch comedy hour, was aired by Nine in 1999. Molloy was a hot property after his success with Tony Martin on the nationally syndicated radio show, Martin Molloy.

Molloy says he still believes his cancelled TV show was good.

The show featured Martin, Molloy, Judith Lucy, Stephen Curry, and the late Crowded House drummer, Paul Hester.

In Molloy’s initial meetings with Nine executives, they told him: “We want a show that doesn’t look like a Channel 9 show.”

Molloy adds: “After our first episode went to air, they went, ‘Can you make it look a little more like a Channel 9 show?

“I still believe it was a good show. Pound for pound, I think it’s as funny as anything I’ve ever done. It was just a bit much for a heritage station like Nine. I’d love to get it out there one day just to show people what all the fuss was about.”

However, at the time, the only fuss was from critics panning the show.

His favourite hater was a woman who phoned into Neil Mitchell’s 3AW radio program.

“Neil wasn’t a huge fan of me. He was running wall to wall calls,” Molloy says.

“An old woman rang up and she goes: ‘It’s just a bunch of fat people sitting on couches’.”

Molloy said he was sacked by then-Nine bosses David Leckie and Ian Johnson.

“They came in with a bottle of red … and said, ‘Sorry, it’s gotta go.’

“We were still working with the fiefdom at that stage, so it only takes one person at the top to say, ‘Get that off my network!’

“We knew the clock was ticking. Every week, we’d go, ‘Oh my God, have you checked the ratings, to see if there was any movement?’ And there just wasn’t.

“But to Nine’s credit, they had me back again.”

Nine re-signed Molloy to helm news-based comedy hour, The Nation, in 2007. But that show also failed to fire.

“When I look back at it, some of it was a bit rough, Molloy says.

“I always feel I was at the top end of when the needle goes into the red when it comes to taste with the networks. It took me a while to swim between the flags.”

To this day, Molloy feels bad he didn’t deliver a hit for Nine.

“I mean this, I honestly do, I owe Nine one,” he says. “They backed me in twice, and it would give me great relief … to crack the code for Nine. They gave me enough rope — twice.”

Molloy is the co-host of Channel 7’s The Front Bar, and Triple M’s Kennedy Molloy, with Jane Kennedy.

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