ABC banks on Catherine Murphy and Tony Armstrong to rescue Monday nights

ABC sports broadcaster Catherine Murphy jokes that she’s a “girl addicted to sport” and sometimes wonders “if I have any personality left, I watch so much sport”.

Case in point: she spent Sunday night watching the men’s four-hour French Open final between Carlos Alcaraz and Alexander Zverev, and was backing up with Monday’s long-weekend AFL matches. Then, on Tuesday morning, she was on News Breakfast presenting the sport. If that wasn’t enough, she also hosts a daily AFL podcast with former coach Paul Roos.

Catherine Murphy is co-hosting the ABC’s new sports panel show, Monday’s Experts.Credit: Wayne Taylor

“I’m at the point of the long weekend where I’m putting in eye drops because I’ve been up all night watching the French Open final, which was a bad decision,” says Murphy. “I should have gone to bed way earlier than I did, so now I’m all eye drops and coffee. Some people have proper long weekends where they actually do things with their friends and family, and I stay up all night watching tennis.”

Now Murphy has another sporting commitment to add to her weekly schedule: the ABC’s new sports entertainment show Monday’s Experts, which she will co-host with her sometime News Breakfast colleague and former radio partner Tony Armstrong.

Running for eight weeks, the show is temporarily taking the place of Q+A. It is pitched as a comedic take on the week’s sporting events, with a mix of comedians, journalists and talking heads filling the panel. Comedians Lizzy Hoo and Aunty Donna’s Broden Kelly are confirmed for episode one.

“I’m so excited to get going on the show because Tony and I haven’t worked at the same time of the day for years,” Murphy says. “We actually used to have a radio show together [Grand National], but the way our careers have gone, we’ve kind of been working at opposite ends of the day. So it’s actually nice to be back in the same time zone as Tony for the first time in years. And one thing’s for sure – I know when Tony’s involved, it’s definitely going to be a really fun time.”

The ABC will be counting on Murphy and Armstrong’s chemistry – they are both incredibly engaging on-air personalities – to rescue Monday nights. The show is part of a refreshed line-up: season two of Marc Fennell’s Stuff the British Stole starts at 8pm, followed by Four Corners and Media Watch, with Monday’s Experts rounding out the evening at 9.35pm.

While Q+A is scheduled to return on August 12, with the political panel show now running in seasons and aligned with parliamentary sitting weeks, its longer-term future is less certain.

Last year, Q+A hit its lowest point in August, when an episode filmed at the Garma festival recorded a national audience of 116,000, according to ratings agency OzTam. (To be fair, it was up against a Matildas World Cup match.) On average, Q+A pulls about 220,000 metro viewers.

For her part, Murphy, who began her career at Irish broadcaster RTE before moving to Australia in 2006 to work at Fox Sports and then the ABC from 2018, says she doesn’t feel much pressure to make sure Monday’s Experts is a Monday night success.

Tony Armstrong will co-host Monday’s Experts alongside Murphy.Credit: Eddie Jim

“Just getting to work with my mates is going to be really fun,” says Murphy. “I don’t feel pressure, probably because I just know we have a great team together ... I know that we can have a really good time, and I really hope that it’s something sports fans will love.”

Whether the show is a success or not – although if it includes Murphy’s dream guests of either Matildas star Mary Fowler or one of tennis’s big three (Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic) it will be pretty good – it’s still a far cry from Murphy’s first on-air job at RTE: covering competitive rock throwing.

“Way back in the day, when I first started in TV, and I was a researcher, and I was behind the scenes, just doing all the jobs that no one wanted to do, they told me I was going to get to do some reporting,” recalls Murphy.

“And I was so excited. They got me to report on stone throwing. I had to go out on the road – and no disrespect to stone throwers – but I had no idea what I was doing.

“But the winner, the emotion at the end of it, there were tears, and I was almost in tears because I didn’t know what I was doing at the start of the day. So the competitor’s tears, my tears, and I made it through. And I remember thinking, ‘Wow, I went into TV reporting to do rock throwing.’ And you know what? If I can get through that early experience, I can get through anything.”

Monday’s Experts premieres on ABC, Monday, 9.35pm.

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