Julia Zemiro’s Home Delivery probes more famous lives

Julia Zemiro with Home Delivery guest, actress Rebecca Gibney. Picture: Mark Tantrum.

Across five seasons of her ABC ­celebrity interview show Home ­Delivery, which happily returns this week, Julia Zemiro has gained thousands of new ABC fans. Most of those fans would never have watched her in those distinctive black harlequin-like costumes with red piping and large white buttons, wearing tight black leggings and high heels, towering over the space and seducing her way through SBS’s far more disreputable RocKwiz.

Zemiro is one of the few television presenters with a large talent controlled by intelligence, which is amply demonstrated in Home Delivery, along with a natural inquisitiveness and compassion.

Yes, there’s still the emotional infectiousness, the exuberant cheerfulness that was there in the pub musical quiz show that ran for so many years — and is so sadly missed — but as an interviewer she finds time and space for ­details many might miss in her interactions with the personalities with whom she spends time, totally committed to her role.

In each appearance Zemiro effortlessly develops a kind of complicity, creating a continuing friendship with the viewer. Her innate sense of showmanship makes audience members feel they are part of the TV game; she’s their big ­sister and their friend, not afraid to rubbish her medium or snap her fingers at it.

In season six (discreetly directed by Damian Davis and executive produced by Davis and Nick Murray for production house CJZ, with Polly Connolly as series producer) Zemiro again walks notable people through their former lives, and helps uncover the people, places and events that shaped them into who they are today.

They include ABC journalist Barrie Cassidy; cook and author Maggie Beer; ex-soldier and transgender advocate Cate McGregor; mus­ician Dave Faulkner; former athletes Raelene Boyle and Nicky Winmar; and, from Britain, the well-known Louis Theroux, Brian Cox and expat Australian Germaine Greer.

As the show’s convention has evolved, each trip back in time is as different as the performers are, even though the structure of each episode is agreeable similar — Zemiro takes them back to their first homes, schools, universities, favourite places, and sometimes attempts to persuade them to demonstrate a special, maybe secret, skill. She cajoles ABC news presenter Leigh Sales, who once had an unlikely job as a pianist and wedding singer, to sit down at the keyboard and, with Zemiro accompanying, bang out her most requested song, Wind Beneath My Wings.

Some of her guests, similar to Sales, revel in returning to the place they grew up and may not have seen in years, and they share happy memories and heartwarming anecdotes.

For others, returning to the scenes of their formative years is a more complicated and emotionally affecting ­experience.

It’s a show that revived the celebrity interview format on local TV, though now we’ve also recently welcomed ­Andrew Denton back to TV with Interview,but in my view his eldritch humour is no match for Zemiro’s.

Interview is on the Seven Network and as writer Margot Saville said of its premiere ­episode: “It’s hard to maintain a conversation between two people when it’s constantly interrupted by ­exhortations to buy a car.”

Zemiro, of course, has an uninterrupted half-hour each week on commercial-free ABC, and first up in this sixth season of Home Delivery is much-loved actress and Gold Logie winner ­Rebecca Gibney who, after many years living in Australia, takes Julia to her native New Zealand.

Gibney has often seemed rather steely in performance but with an attractive vulnerability underlying each character she plays, a slight tremulousness, though she maintains an acute control over the shape of every line and movement.

She is a fine actress indeed and really has been brilliant in a long career, even when forced to manage some thin material with what has become her trademark resolute precision.

Gibney was terrific as the conservative and superstitious Maria Korp in the fine telemovie Wicked Love a few years back, matriarch Julie Rafter in the long-running Packed to the Rafters, and most recently as the damaged Lola Buckley in the terrific character-driven country noir Wanted, a 40-something blonde fallen into a job at the local supermarket then suddenly involved in a violent carjacking and on the run from corrupt cops.

After a cable car ride overlooking the actress’s home town, Wellington, ­Zemiro and Gibney jump into a classic black Mini — Gibney’s first car was a Mini with a gold racing stripe down the middle — and head out to trace the latter’s life in the country’s capital, the duo accompanied by the occasional flow of easy laughter.

But it’s a place where as a child Gibney lived in more than 10 homes, her father a heavy drinker constantly on the move, and there’s a great deal of sadness in her account at times.

Gibney suffered debilitating panic attacks from the age of 14 to 32 when her career was already under way, a star after Crawfords’ The Flying Doctors.

“I think my panic attacks were the result of me burying feelings and that I became the ultimate people pleaser and I was always looking for male relationships to kind of complete me because my father’s ­relationship was so fractured, and then he died,” she says.

At 32, she reveals, she suffered “a complete and utter breakdown” and that “inside I was a hole, a black hole”. She reveals later, too, that she suffered, like so many actors, from a kind of inferiority complex.

She says she worried for years that the audience “would find out I’m not very good at this and I won’t get to do the job any more because I never trained”.

And she recalls the sage advice of veteran actor Maurie Fields, with whom she co-starred in The Flying Doctors during the 1980s: “Show up on time, know your lines and don’t be a dick.” The centrepiece of the episode is Zemiro and Gibney’s fraught visit to the home where Gibney’s father was living when he died at 51, a man who, for all his failings, loved a good laugh, and the actress — his carer for the last six months of his life — describes her final conversation with him. She and her elder brother Patrick discuss their traumatic childhood but pay tribute to their mother, Shirley, who guided them through it, always closing the doors in the house when she knew Gibney’s father was coming home drunk, and constantly talking of forgiveness.

Gibney reveals Shirley had been sexually abused by her own father as a child, instinctively finding refuge in her husband.

“Then he just went to the pub after work and starting drinking,” says the actress. “She had six children and back then you just didn’t talk about it, and she’s often said since then that because of what happened to her in her childhood she carried so much guilt over the abuse of her father that when she was beaten up by Dad there was a part of her that felt she deserved it.”

It’s highly emotional and confronting for Gibney, who now also works as a campaigner against domestic violence, and Zemiro, illustrating the host’s gifts as an interviewer and ­Gibney’s grace as person and performer.

Zemiro understands the trick is turning an interview into a conversation, getting the subject to volunteer more than they might usually in such contrived circumstances.

You never sense her waiting to toss in a question she has been thinking about, mulling over while nodding and agreeing with her subject’s chat. And she listens intently, the way all very good actors do, working off cadence and intonation — a closed ear is the weakness of all bad interviewers. It doesn’t matter how thorough your preparation is, you have to be able to shift and weave and follow the conversational leads.

There’s nothing held back with Zemiro, no reserve of the public personality into which she can take refuge if things go south. I like the way too she sometimes demonstrates the way she is thinking, the way she will ask something as she is articulating it, the way that stand-up comics work — she has a comedian’s background after all. It’s endearing and original in the interviewing caper.

She’s simply one of the most vivid people working on TV: alive, immediate and genuinely interested, the impact of observed life the most empathetic quality of her style.

Julia Zemiro’s Home Delivery
Wednesday, 8pm, ABC.