Gossip Queen: Sam Newman comes clean on legendary Footy Show tales
Sam Newman has revealed the truth behind one of the great Footy Show legends as the program is consigned to the TV graveyard while Eddie McGuire has called for Newman to be inducted into Australian TV’s Hall of Fame.
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Sam Newman has revealed the truth behind one of the great Footy Show legends as the program is consigned to the TV graveyard.
He has shed light on a TV tale from the late 1990s, where — legend has it — that at the peak of The Footy Show’s success, he and Eddie McGuire were considered so valuable to Channel 9 that they could not travel on small planes together in case something dire occurred. The tale had them akin to royalty of the TV kind. But it may be a tall tale rather than a TV tale.
“That might be apocryphal,” Newman chuckled on Saturday.
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“I have heard that story. For whatever reason it might have been a convenient thing to say at the time as Ed could not fly at the same time as I could, because he had other interests, or businesses or things going on. Because I travelled differently to him, people might have used that long bow.”
Meanwhile, McGuire has called for Newman to be inducted into Australian TV’s Hall of Fame.
Newman was a mainstay, and primary headline generator, of the show for 25 years before moving on to the Sunday Footy Show.
“There is no doubt that Sam Newman has been one of the most influential people in the history of media in this town and now that the show has finished we can actually reflect on that,” he said on Triple M.
“If he does not get into the TV Hall of Fame then it is a get-up. Whether you like him or not, he has been a dominant feature on Australian TV.”
Newman said he was indebted to the show and McGuire, saying: “When we got together with Trevor Marmalade 25 years ago we embarked on a pioneering venture, we had no idea where it was going to end up. But from day one I said, ‘we are only filling in time until we get sacked,’ and we were.”
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