Angela Bishop: ‘I never know when the grief will hit’
STILL reeling from the death of her husband last year, the Studio 10 co-host opens up about battling on through heartbreak and gaining strength from her daughter.
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ANGELA Bishop was enjoying an enviously close-up view of the wedding of the decade — Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s star-studded nuptials — as she reported on the event for Network Ten in May.
But behind her professional exterior lay a heart that was breaking. On the 24-hour flight back from London, Bishop marked her first wedding anniversary without her husband Peter Baikie, who passed away from a rare cancer in November last year.
Just hours before boarding she had been discussing the wonders of the royal wedding with actor Richard E. Grant in the Qantas lounge. But she soon found herself locked in the bathroom, having a “full-on sob”, as she reminisced about the autumn day 13 years ago when she married Baikie in Scots Kirk church in Sydney’s Mosman.
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“[It] brought back beautiful memories of our wedding,” Bishop tells Stellar through tears. “You never know when [the grief] is going to happen. You never know when it’s going to hit.”
That grief certainly wasn’t going to stop Bishop from doing her job, though. The seasoned professional cleaned herself up, stepped off the flight at 5am and headed straight to the studios in Sydney to broadcast three and a half more hours of live television in her new role as co-host for Studio 10.
That work ethic has seen one of the Australian media’s most familiar faces last 29 years in the brutal and fickle industry — a tenure that has stretched longer than those of many of her bosses.
“I’ve been through many ups and downs,” Bishop, 50, says. “But every time, you’ve just got to put your head down and your bum up and do the best you can do. Because that’s the only thing you can control.”
Bishop believes her can-do attitude comes from growing up in an environment where nine-to-five jobs didn’t exist. Her father, Alan, was a district court judge, while her mother is former Liberal Party politician Bronwyn, who holds the record for the longest service — nearly 30 years — for a woman in Federal Parliament.
As Bishop tells it, her mother knew by the time she was 16 that she wanted to influence the laws of the land; her daughter knew at 11 that she wanted to write about the people who did, and so pursued a journalistic career. Despite a passion for the arts, entertainment journalism didn’t cross her mind. Instead she opted to study for a political science degree at the University of New South Wales.
“I actually wrote a paper saying that one day the US would elect a celebrity as president. It got a distinction at the time, but retrospectively it should have got a high distinction,” she jokes. Bishop became the first female chairman of the students’ union, and after graduation applied for a cadetship at Ten. She’s been there ever since.
She started out working the midnight-to-dawn shift, standing in the coldest wind tunnels in front of local courts, and covering a Christmas Day murder in Orange, NSW, in 1990. Her first taste of celebrity came via Audrey Hepburn, who was visiting Australia for UNICEF.
“I was beside myself; I spent two weeks’ pay on my outfit. It was a double-breasted dress in pale pink with silver shell buttons and I worked it back with a pale pink shoe,” Bishop recalls. “I’ll remember this to the day I die: she said, ‘You look lovely.’ I was done. I’d just received a compliment from the most stylish woman in the world. I thought, ‘Nothing will ever top this.’”
Bishop would go on to interview everyone from Beyoncé to the cast of The Bold And The Beautiful. She’s hung out backstage with Bono at a U2 concert and managed to get the notoriously grumpy Harrison Ford to crack a smile. She’s travelled to Los Angeles more than 130 times and stood for countless hours on red carpets waiting for a celebrity to give a 30-second interview. She’s had coughing fits in front of Lionel Richie, met Princess Diana, been to Beach Boy Brian Wilson’s house and counts Keith Urban and Nicole Kidman as personal friends.
But her first celebrity interview may have influenced her the most: inspired by Hepburn, Bishop uses her public profile to support charities close to her heart, such as the Sydney Breast Cancer Foundation, Grace Centre for Newborn Care at The Children’s Hospital Westmead and the Heart Centre for Children.
“Ange remains the humble, hard-working and selfless person she’s always been,” says Tim Bailey, her colleague of 26 years. “While many in her position might have got an ego, she hasn’t. You might see her photographed with the world’s biggest names but she knows that isn’t real life. The photos that show the real Ange are the ones with her daughter Amelia, standing on the balcony of their apartment with birds on their arms.”
Family is even more precious since the passing of her husband. She met the mechanic at a piano bar on Chinese New Year in 2002 and wed him three years later. They welcomed their daughter soon after.
“The bond between mother and daughter is so special and precious,” Bishop says. “Mum and I, we’ve always been best buddies. We never had difficult teenage years and I count myself really lucky and pray to the gods Amelia and I will be the same.”
Bishop’s 10-year-old daughter is helping her deal with the loss of Baikie. “I’m blessed with family and friends you would pin medals on. They’ve been incredible. But fundamentally, the most strength I’m getting is from Amelia,” Bishop says. “We’re just this team. I think we’re giving strength to one another.”
The pair are still grieving hard; at this point, Bishop can’t really say what she has learnt about herself through this tragedy. “It’s too soon to know. I’m not in a position to be objective in any way. It’s still happening, right here.”
Although Bishop believes Amelia has developed her love of the arts (she recently went to her first Midnight Oil concert) and determination (she wants to be an inventor), she reckons she has also inherited plenty from her dad.
“Mannerisms, his sense of humour and his fearlessness. And I’m so glad,” she says with pride. Together, the two are getting on with life in true Bishop style: head down and bum up.
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Originally published as Angela Bishop: ‘I never know when the grief will hit’
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