‘Sudden’: How Waleed Aly found out The Project was cancelled

Television presenter Waleed Aly reveals what was happening behind the scenes of The Project on the day the show’s cancellation was announced.

Waleed Aly expects to be on dish duty for the foreseeable future. After missing dinnertime with his family for almost 15 years – first on ABC Radio, then as co-host of The Project for the past decade – Aly appreciates that he has a lot of lost time to make up after the show wraps on Friday night.

“I think [original Project co-hosts] Charlie [Pickering] and Carrie [Bickmore] referenced it too when they left,” Aly, 46, tells Stellar of finally being home in the evening. “And it may sound silly or trite, but it’s a much bigger thing than you’d expect. I look forward to cooking more, but it’s scary contemplating the mountains of dishes I will have to get through. It’s hard to see past them.”

Having more time with his wife Susan Carland and their children is bittersweet for Aly, who laments that Aisha, 22, and Zayd, 18, are now “probably past the point where they want to spend a lot of time with me”.

Waleed Aly and wife Susan Carland. Picture: Brendan Beckett

And yet he was surprised how much the news affected them. “That’s what’s added to the emotional weight of all this, because my kids grew up through this show,” he explains. “And talking to the kids about it was actually harder than I expected. It hit them in a way that I didn’t quite anticipate.”

The news came as less of a shock to the broadcaster, who got “a slightly longer heads-up than some other people. I only knew for less than a week before it was public. So it was all fairly sudden. The hardest day was definitely the day it was announced – that’s when you are in the room with all your colleagues. People that you’ve worked with, in some cases, for more than a decade. People at really difficult stages in their lives. They’ve just bought a home, or they’re just about to have a baby…

“This isn’t a unique experience to us,” he continues. “[It] happens across lots of industries and in lots of workplaces. It’s sad every time.”

Aly says the ‘hardest day’ was when the show’s cancellation was announced. Picture: Network 10

While Aly understands the interest, and that the show isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, he struggles to see why there’s satisfaction to be found in people losing their job.

“It happens in politics, too, right?” he reflects on some of the reactions to the show’s end. “And I get that, because those things are a contest. I remember thinking about when Peter Dutton lost his seat, and how that would be so hard – not only does he lose his job, but he loses it in a really public way and in a way that’s partisan, so that there will be a whole lot of people that are delighted about it.”

The target of regular scrutiny and critical commentary, Aly has learnt to tune out the noise. Describing The Project as “the little show that could”, he points out that critics have speculated the axe was looming since its 2009 debut with Bickmore, Pickering and Dave Hughes at the helm.

“I wasn’t working on the show, but I knew people who were. And I remember they weren’t meant to get through the first summer. It ended up becoming the spine of the network,” he says. “It’s a pretty amazing achievement.”

Aly is proud of what he’s achieved since replacing Pickering as co-host in 2015, naming among the highlights his coverage of the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the 2019 meeting between North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and US president Donald Trump, and Brexit.

Aly is proud of what he’s achieved since replacing Pickering as co-host in 2015. Picture: Network 10

Those stories didn’t go viral like his 2015 speech about Isis or his 2019 editorial on the Christchurch mosque shootings, but they still made him feel “like you got to put something on commercial TV that you didn’t think was actually possible”.

Shrugging off accusations the show was “too woke”, he argues that a lot of its most outspoken critics didn’t actually watch it. Because if they did, he argues, they would have seen that “we tried to treat everyone – even if we were doing a tough interview or an accountability interview – with respect and dignity. We didn’t shy away from asking hard questions, even of the people we liked.”

With the end looming, Aly has spent time talking with current and former co-hosts Bickmore and Peter Helliar – who remain close friends – about “what a gift it was to work together”. Both Aly and Bickmore won Gold Logies and Helliar was nominated in what many would argue was The Project’s prime. Agreeing that 2015 to 2021 were big years, Aly shrugs that he “will leave it to others to judge when the golden age was”.

With Carrie Bickmore and Peter Helliar. Picture: Network 10

Now Aly is the one headed for the door, with no idea what the future holds. The only thing on his slate is a break from the grind of daily broadcasting – a prospect that’s both daunting and full of promise.

“There’s a lot about doing a show like The Project that’s great, but the flip side is there’s so much you can’t do,” he explains. “It means so many things have come my way that I just haven’t really been able to consider because I’m on air all the time.

“So it’s a really sad moment, and it’s really sad to know that I’m losing a whole lot of people that I really care about in my professional life. But there’s something exciting about going: ‘All right, now there’s a blank canvas. What do we put on it?’”

One thing he knows won’t be on the horizon: a stint on reality TV. “The word ‘jungle’ has been mentioned,” he reveals with a laugh. “I have no intention of doing that. That’s actually been the strangest thing. Even in my private life, people are kind of like, ‘Hey, do you want to do this?’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t know. I actually have no idea…’ Because I don’t know if I’m available in July next year.”

The final episode of The Project airs this Friday on Network 10.

Read the interview with Waleed Aly in today’s Stellar with Shelley Sullivan on the cover, inside The Sunday Telegraph (NSW), Sunday Herald Sun (VIC), The Sunday Mail (QLD) and Sunday Mail (SA). For more from Stellar and the podcast, Something To Talk About, click here.

Originally published as ‘Sudden’: How Waleed Aly found out The Project was cancelled