Larry Emdur on discovering Rove in a garage and his TV ‘marriage’
One of Australia’s best-loved TV stars has revealed how he “discovered” Rove McManus, and the “long-running feud” between the pair.
Larry Emdur’s new memoir Happy As is a fast-paced, funny journey from a blissful Bondi boyhood to his current position as one of morning TV’s biggest stars.
In this exclusive edited extract, Larry reveals how he discovered one of Australia’s best-loved TV personalities, and opens up on the pair’s “long-running feud”.
“There are a couple of young guys doing a TV show out of a garage, and they want to come in to the set of The Price Is Right and film a little stunt — what do you think?” the show’s publicist asked.
We’d get these requests all the time. By 1998, Price had well and truly burnt itself into popular culture with its kooky catchphrases and crazy contestants. We had regular set
visits by people who wanted to include us in their quirky little projects.
One time, we shot a quick skit during a commercial break. They told me it was for a low-budget film, and if I agreed to be involved, I’d get paid something crazy like $126. Clearly the price was wrong, but I was up for anything fun. I was told all I had to do was play the host of The Price Is Right: a role that I, for your information, executed brilliantly.
Well, that little low-budget film was called The Castle and it’s still considered one of the greatest Australian movies ever made, and my appearance in it is still considered one of the greatest and most accurate portrayals of Larry Emdur hosting The Price Is Right ever.
I was absolutely and positively unforgettable. But I’m just reminding you in case you’ve forgotten about it.
So, yes, I was up for doing fun stuff on the side. The young guys from the garage got held up and never made it into the show to film their skit. I said to the publicist, “Why don’t I just
go into their garage and be interviewed on their show?”
She was quite surprised by that, but I had quite a bit of downtime during Price recording weeks in Melbourne and I often didn’t do much.
My limo pulled up to the garage.
“Hi, I’m Rove!” said the incredibly enthusiastic, smiley young guy who shook my hand at the garage door. If the Energiser Bunny had a long-lost human brother, this was him. “Oh, my
gosh, thanks for coming in, we can’t believe you’ve come in! This is my friend Pete Helliar.”
The Loft Live was a fabulously cheap-and-nasty tonight show being produced in a garage at RMIT Uni in Melbourne and broadcast on community TV Channel 31. It was a tonight show with “L” plates on it. Rove once told me his budget for the show was $50 a week, but I could tell the show actually ran on adrenaline, enthusiasm, naivety, a truly wonderful sense of the
absurd and a passionate love of television.
Rove and Pete followed no network rules, there were no grumpy TV execs saying you can’t do this or you can’t do that, no sponsors to appease. It was just crazy, freestyling, highly
contagious fun. It honestly looked like a bunch of mates had got together in a garage, picked up an old desk and a scrappy lounge from a council collection pile, convinced some other mates to operate the cameras and were doing a cross between The Tonight Show and Wayne’s World.
IT WAS BLOODY FANTASTIC!!!
We did the interview, and it was great fun. These guys were ON FIRE! It was clear to see that Rove as a host had The ‘IT’ Factor.
The very next day I made an appointment with the legendary boss of GTV9 Melbourne, Ian Johnson, specifically to ask him if he’d ever heard about this young guy Rove. He said he hadn’t. I said you’ve got to hunt him down, he’s a young Daryl Somers or Steve Vizard, very funny, very fast, good-looking, great hair.
He’s really good.
Now, I don’t know if that particular conversation resonated with Ian or not. I’d like to claim that I discovered Rove in that garage, but if that were true, he would probably feel compelled to gift me between twenty and thirty per cent of every dollar he’s ever made. And he’s never offered to do that. #waiting
A few months later, it was announced that young Melbourne comedian Rove McManus was launching his own late-night variety show on Channel 9, with the incredibly inventive and
creative title Rove. I often wonder if the same creative genii who named Rove’s show Rove were also paid millions of dollars to come up with that extremely clever name for Seven’s new morning show, which they called The Morning Show.
Fast-forward a million years, and I refuse to acknowledge that Rove got me my current job on The Morning Show, otherwise he’d be entitled to twenty to thirty per cent of every dollar I’ve ever earned from that show, and that’s never gonna happen.
It was 2006, and I was hosting Wheel of Fortune on Channel 7. Rove and I were on rival networks – about a year after debuting on Channel 9, the show had moved to Channel 10 – but we had become great mates. We were at one of our regular long lunches, and had consumed enough wine to consider how funny it would be if I came in and appeared on Rove Live (as it was now called). I proposed it to the Seven publicity team. Why shouldn’t I break the Golden Rule and appear on another network if it was going to be great publicity for Wheel?
Surprisingly, they agreed!
So I went on Rove Live and we had great fun.
Shortly thereafter, Wheel was axed. Naturally, I blamed it entirely on Rove. And so began our long-running “feud”. We’ve sumo-wrestled, we’ve taunted each other on social media, we’ve had a boxing match which only ended when I punched him in the dick. But I still consider him one of my great mates.
So I was floating between jobs, but it was no big deal. I had property investments and a lot of corporate work. Remember, I am the most-axed man on television, so by this point I was quite good at being “between jobs”. It was the way it worked in the jungle.
Early one morning, Rove took it upon himself to appear in the big window behind Kochie and Mel Doyle on Channel 7’s Sunrise with a huge handwritten sign that said: SAVE LARRY
This earth-shattering campaign had people holding up signs in the strangest places and even graffitiing SAVE LARRY on freeway walls and bus stops. Now, I was already doing bits and pieces with Sunrise so I was kind of on their radar, but about the same time I was called in to host a pilot for a cleverly named concept called The Morning Show.
Bear in mind that by this stage, I’d hosted or been the fill-in host on over twenty different shows, on all three free-to-air commercial TV networks. The big fill-in gigs had been on
Hey Hey It’s Saturday, Tonight Live with Steve Vizard, IMT (the late-1990s revival of Graham Kennedy’s legendary In Melbourne Tonight), and others you probably don’t remember – I didn’t until I googled myself! Shows like Uncle Tobys Super Series (Ten), Chance and Coincidence (Seven), Starstruck (Nine), Surprise Wedding (Seven) and The Very Best of the World’s Best Ads (Nine).
As one TV exec once put it: “Emdur, you’re a TV slut!”
I’d done countless auditions and even more pilots. So The Morning Show was just the latest in a long line. (I probably had another pilot audition the following week at Channel 9 for a
show where contestants get married after only just meeting each other, but that’d never work …)
To my surprise, The Morning Show was actually given the go-ahead, with me and Lisa Wilkinson as hosts. But Lisa decided it wasn’t for her so I started auditioning with other potential co-hosts. The directive was: “Put a stranger on the couch next to Larry and tell them to act like best friends.”
Within minutes of starting her audition, Kylie Gillies was chatting away to me and we were laughing and carrying on like old mates. We just clicked, and we’ve never un-clicked. It would be impossible to fake this kind of connection for two-and-a-half hours of live TV, five days a week for fifteen years. We make each other laugh, we “get” each other.
It’s a powerful relationship. We rarely agree on stuff: she likes the Royals, I like The Rock; she likes re-runs of Keeping Up with the Kardashians, I like re-runs of Baywatch; she liked being on Dancing with the Stars, I hated being on Dancing with the Stars.
But all those differences are exactly what makes this relationship so great. We hear a lot of people say they see their own relationships mirrored in ours – she likes this, he likes that,
she pays attention, he doesn’t. It’s yin and yang, it’s how most relationships are. We may disagree, but we know where each other is going, when each other is going to start or stop and, most of the time, what each other is thinking.
It’s often described as a TV marriage, and that’s fair: some days I spend more time with Kylie on the couch than I do with Sylvie at home, and Kylie and I have been through a lot together.
Initially we were told The Morning Show would probably only be a three to six-month trial. It was coming into a crowded market, with both Channel 9 and Channel 10 having
established similar shows in that timeslot, so we just didn’t know if it would work.
Well, from day one it won the ratings, and since then we’ve been the top morning show every year for fifteen years. That’s an incredible thing to be able to say in this industry. The little baby TV show we gave birth to is now a feisty, pimply teenager with three mothers – Kylie, Director of Morning Television Sarah Stinson, and Executive Producer Chloe Flynn – and one goofy dad, me. We’re very proud of our fun little slice of television, and of course of our fabulous team.
People always ask me what are my favourite or most memorable moments. There’ve been thousands – here are just a few …
The late great Joan Rivers was sitting on The Morning Show couch, and just as the interview started, she said, on live TV: “Can I say ‘vagina’ on this show? Is this the sort of show where I can say ‘vagina’?”
I wouldn’t have thought so. Hang on, let me phone a friend.
We were interviewing Meat Loaf on the show and Kylie started calling him “Meat”. Yes, she felt that familiar with him! Both Meat and I lost it.
We were beginning our interview with Michael Bolton and he appeared to fall asleep as we were introducing him. This story went around the world; he denied it but it was bloody funny.
The Morning Show has also allowed me to continue doing the sort of TV I used to love as a young reporter: getting out into the street and interviewing ordinary people about stupid stuff. It’s always funniest when they’re drunk; that’s when the best TV happens.
Once, in the back carpark at the Melbourne Cup, a young lady who’d had a wonderful day on cheap champagne and no food ran over to us and yelled: “I don’t have any underpants on!”
“Why not?” I asked her.
She pointed to a drunk guy lying on the grass and said: “He ate them!”
Another time, exploring the topic Country Versus City Love at the legendary CMC Rocks country music festival in Ipswich, Queensland, a happy young lady with a can of VB in a stubby holder approached us. I put a microphone in front of her and I asked: “What would you do if your boyfriend cheated on you?”
Without skipping a beat, she described an act that won’t make it into this newspaper extract (Editor’s note: too right – for that you’d better read Larry’s book), adding: “That’d teach him!”
You see, this is why I love being in television. OK, I’ll never win a Walkley journalism award with interviews like that, but geeeez, I’m making memorable TV.
Read Angela Mollard’s exclusive interview with Larry in Stellar today
Happy As by Larry Emdur, published by HarperCollins, is on sale from August 3 and available for pre-order now.
Originally published as Larry Emdur on discovering Rove in a garage and his TV ‘marriage’
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