Sacked Showbiz: How being fired fuelled Molloy’s success

The shows Mick Molloy is best known for wouldn’t have happened without the lessons he’d learned from being sacked from other jobs, he says.

Mick Molloy says being fired has only fuelled him. Picture: Jake Nowakowski

Mick Molloy says he’s learned lessons from every sacking in the cut throat TV and radio game.

“They’re always brutal,” Molloy told the Herald Sun’s Sacked: Showbiz podcast. “The end game is, ‘You’re not good enough, we don’t want you.’ It’s hard.”

He adds: “You know the odds in this business. Boo hoo. They can’t all be winners.”

Molloy, co-host of Channel 7’s The Front Bar, and Triple M’s top rating Kennedy Molloy program, was sacked from Channel 9 twice (The Mick Molloy Show and The Nation), Channel 7 once (D-Genocide), and “didn’t have a show renewed” by Triple M.

Molloy said he found the lesson in every misstep and used it to fuel his next move.

After his first Channel 9 dismissal, Molloy made a film, Crackerjack.

After the second one, Molloy personally paid staff and crew because he’d taken them from other work, only to have The Nation axed.

“When they were no longer working for me, I felt a real responsibility,” Molloy said. “I kept the staff on for five weeks on full play, which I was paying out of my own pocket, because I felt it wasn’t fair.

“It was another way of getting the band back together and keeping my key group employed.”

In a career of highs and occasional lows, Molloy has skilfully shifted between jobs in television, radio, movies and the stage.

“That’s another good tactic of mine; being a moving target,” Molloy said, laughing.

But every experience has added to Molloy’s cache, and the hard knocks of the past taught him to stand up for The Front Bar.

“I can name five times when that show was on the ropes, when it could have gone the other way,” Molloy says. “If I had less experience under the belt, it probably would have gone the other way.”

When Molloy first pitched The Front Bar to networks, they weren’t interested.

Molloy piloted the show online, then Channel 7 swooped, trialling The Front Bar in various timeslots.

“I remember one meeting … where they didn’t want us to go before the footy, and I felt we were ready. That was the meeting where I felt we could have – I hate the term ‘deal breaker’ because it’s so swaggery and cowboy – but there was a point where I went, ‘There are terms to be satisfied here, or we’re not going on.’

“In the past, I would have put it in a way that would have agitated it. This time, we managed to work it through.”

Molloy says he’s also learned not to burn bridges in the industry.

“There’s a fair chance you’ll be trying to work with these people again at some stage. You can’t afford to go in throwing haymakers, or tipping over furniture, or setting fire to pot plants.”