Sharp Shooting: Nine veteran facing ‘nudge’, Kyle and Jackie O’s big mistake
One of Nine’s biggest stars, also one of the oldest working entertainment reporters, has addressed “whispers” of a massive paycut and pressure to call it quits.
At 70, Nine’s Richard Wilkins is one of the oldest working music and entertainment reporters in the world.
It’s a role he plainly has no interest in relinquishing anytime soon despite, we hear, his employer hinting the time may have come.
Last week came whispers Wilkins has been forced to take a massive pay cut, one that would brings his salary down to around $200k.
Wilkins on Thursday denied the talk, assuring us his famed mullet had not been reduced to a tidy pompadour crop in the interests of helping Nine’s beancounters save money.
Insiders maintain Nine has for some time been nudging Wilkins towards the company’s exit lounge but the savvy Wilkins knows well how to leverage his national media profile with lucrative side hustles including public speaking opps, gigs that these days keep him in the air and also in the rock star style to which he’s become accustomed.
Plan to farewell Aussie icon revealed
Australian fashion icon Maggie Tabberer will be farewelled at a private ceremony in Sydney next week.
The Adelaide-born model, designer and media identity, who died on December 6, will be celebrated at an intimate gathering to be held at an undisclosed location.
A family member has told news.com.au a public memorial will be held for Tabberer in early 2025.
The Premier’s department has confirmed Tabberer’s family has to date expressed no interest in a state funeral.
Sources have informed this column the Tabberer family instead plan to hold a less formal send-off more in keeping with Tabberer’s rebellious, vibrant and creative personality.
Tabberer, who would have turned 88 on December 11, is survived by daughters Brooke and Amanda, grandson Marco and a stepson, Nico Prossimo.
Born Margaret May to Australian parents Alfred and Molly Trigar in 1936, Tabberer credited her striking European looks to her maternal grandmother’s brief affair with a mysterious foreign sailor who abandoned her grandmother before Tabberer’s mother was born.
Dubbed “Maggie” by famed fashion photographer Helmut Newton, who is credited with discovering Tabberer in 1958, Tabberer began modelling professionally after welcoming her second daughter Amanda in 1957.
By 1963, her marriage to businessman Charles Tabberer behind her, the highly regarded David Jones fashion model and budding public relations consultant was tapped to appear on Channel 7’s series of Beauty and The Beast alongside journalist and radio personality Eric Baume.
The role made Tabberer a household name and spurred a career as a newspaper fashion columnist before, in 1969, the beauty was given her own chat show, Maggie, on Channel 7, which ran until 1971 garnering her two gold Logie awards.
Her PR business, Maggie Tabberer Associates and marriage to Italian-born restaurateur Ettore Prossimo, sustained Tabberer in the ’70s as too did a new association, with then little known agent Harry M Miller, who would bring in lucrative sponsorships ranging from Maxwell House to Black & Decker.
In 1980 Tabberer launched, with backing from ragtrader Carl Dowd, her eponymous plus-size Maggie T designs. The following year she was appointed fashion editor of The Australian Women’s Weekly, an association that lasted 14 years into the mid 1990s, introducing her to a new generation.
Television came calling again in 1990 with The Home Show on ABC before Foxtel signed her to her own interview show, Maggie … At Home With, in 2005.
The perennial Tabberer remained a spirited firebrand well into her eighties, when diabetes compromised her mobility and health.
New Media Watch host draws old enemy
The ABC’s new Media Watch presenter doesn’t start until next year but he’s already drawing fierce fire from an old enemy.
The appointment of former investigative reporter Linton Besser as Paul Barry’s replacement has revived a 14-year feud between Besser and Australian businessman Charif Kazal.
In 2011 an ICAC investigation and public inquiry found Kazal, a Sydney restaurant owner, had acted corruptly in business dealings with a Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority (SHFA) official when it found Kazal had offered $11,000 in inducements and a job to government official Andrew Kelly. Despite the findings the property tycoon and Kelly were never criminally charged by the DPP due to ICAC also finding there was a lack of admissible evidence.
Twelve years on and Kazal, who in 2017 took the fight to clear his name to the United Nations Human Rights Commission – which found in his favour in 2023 recently prompting the Australian government to ask that the matter be relitigated – plainly hasn’t forgotten whose reports spurred the reputationally bruising ICAC investigation.
Those reports were the work of Besser, then at Fairfax.
With the world court’s verdict reviving his campaign to clear his name, last month Kazal wrote to ABC chairman Kim Williams to complain about Besser’s appointment to the national role of on-air media whistleblower.
In a long and robust letter, Kazal recounted his battle with ICAC, his feud with former business partner Rodric David and made a series of allegations about Besser who left Fairfax for ABC in 2013. (The ABC on Thursday denied two of these allegations – namely that Besser was “removed” from his employment at Fairfax and also that Mr David had once attended the same school as Besser.)
That was also the year Kazal lost his case to have ICAC’s finding overruled by the Supreme Court.
On Wednesday, following inquiries from News.com.au, Kazal received a response to his letter from ABC’s Chief Content Officer Chris Oliver-Taylor.
In a four-par response Oliver-Taylor said: “My Besser is one of the ABC’s brightest talents and we are confident in his appointment to host Media Watch in 2025.”
Kyle and Jackie O’s biggest critic doubles down
KIIS FM’s radio assault on Melbourne took another hit in the final ratings survey of the year sliding backwards by another 24,000 listeners into sixth place in that market with a worrying 5.0 share.
Of course the result stands in stark contrast to sluttier Sydney where Sandilands and Jackie “O” Henderson’s breakfast show maintained its top ranking FM spot with a 13.5 share.
The news of the breakfast show’s continued Melbourne slide was greeted gleefully by the radio duo’s former newsreader Geoff Field, who has made it his personal mission, of late on app Blue Sky, to hold the duo to account for the litany of crude and offensive sexist, misogynistic and homophobic remarks they routinely drop on the airwaves.
Field, who quit the breakfast show in 2010 after being skewered on air one too many times, didn’t miss a chance to call the duo out in October when Sandilands scorched an unnamed employee live on air with the remark: “I’m talking bitch. You talk every time I’m talking. You’re a dumb person. Get your sh*t together when you come to work!”
According to Field: “Many of us copped this and worse. It has to stop and madam (Henderson) is just as culpable.”
Culpable maybe but Henderson is also untouchable if the media’s fawning response to her drug addiction admission this year is any indication.
Then last week, the duo’s producers pitched a segment concept so juvenile, so disturbing, it not only enraged anti-incest advocates it also renewed an advertiser boycott campaign which to date has prompted Telstra and Taronga Zoo to pull their ad dollars from the show.
The concept, as it was presented on the breakfast show on December 9: “We get a woman in the studio bending over, they get two different penises inside them and we ask ‘Is it your partner of is it your dad?’’’
An act of desperation or a proclamation K & J are untouchable, it will be up to the catatonic Australian Communications and Media Authority to determine.
Add it to the list.
Nine Radio’s safe choice for Hadley show
Meanwhile across the dial at Nine Radio, Sydney station 2GB has opted for the safe choice in handing departing morning show broadcaster Ray Hadley’s show to Mark Levy, the man Hadley tutored so well, he sounds exactly like Hadley.
The appointment, predicted by us a month ago, makes one thing clear.
That is that Nine is frightened to be losing Hadley, who has been number one in his slot for two decades (with one recent aberration) but was under pressure following the network’s recent culture review.
A Nine exec refused to comment officially when we questioned any impact the culture review clean-out may have had on Hadley last month. The network is maintaining its public position that it “(wishes) Ray all the best in his retirement”.
Real reason ER reboot was canned
It was one of the hit shows of the 90s, and broke the Hollywood career of George Clooney. Now, one of its stars reveals why a reboot of ER never happened.
‘Never happened before’: Star storms off show
Excruciatingly awkward scenes have played out on The Masked Singer, with a global star throwing a tantrum after being evicted.
Reporter back on-air after LA fires TV gaffe
A US news anchor has returned on screens one day after he was blasted for his “narcissistic” wardrobe while reporting on the front lines of the LA wildfires.