David Leckie goes from right hooks to fish hooks

Illustration: Peter Nicholson

How times change. While the young bucks of the entertainment industry were duking it out on the balcony of Crown’s Club 23 in the wee small hours of Sunday night, television stalwart David Leckie was a world away from the Logies.

Instead the Seven exec, likely to be on Kerry Stokes’ payroll considering TV’s big picture for life, was celebrating his 65th birthday in the far north of Western Australia on a fishing trip, where no black tie was required.

Leckie, who these days is in rude health after renovating his life in recent times, understands the passions that industry events like Sunday’s can ignite.

We can’t forget the former Seven chief publicly going toe-to-toe with billionaire and former mentee James Packer at industry veteran Sam Chisholm’s 70th birthday bash at the Sydney Opera House in 2009.

The now gaming mogul and then Nine owner didn’t mince words when he told Leckie to “f. k off”, before offering to take the exchange over Seven’s coverage of Packer’s affairs offline.

“You want to go outside now? Let’s do it,” Packer famously threatened.

Table serve

Romanian-born judo champion Nicholae Bicher had two reasons to be in a good mood ­yesterday.

First, the new eatery Bicher part owns in inner-city Sydney’s Darlinghurst — Bar Machiavelli — had just received a good ­review from food critic Terry Durack.

And second, he had Barry Humphries (paisley jacket, mint pants, burgundy loafers and no socks) in the lunch crowd. The doyen of comedy was seated on the “David Leckie table”, just one over from the “Harold Mitchell table”, where we were sitting.

Just as well we didn’t go to Rockpool.

Humphries made a stir the other week when as Dame Edna he sparred with Waleed Aly on Ten’s The Project.

So on our way out we asked for Humphries’ thoughts on Aly’s Gold Logie win.

It was news to the visiting Londoner.

“That’s very depressing,” he told us.

Staying in television awards news, Richard Kerbaj, the one-time Oz journalist, now security correspondent at London’s Sunday Times, has won the British Academy Television Awards’ best single documentary for his My Son the Jihadi. Nicely done.

In Turnbull’s corner

If Aitken Investment Management executive director Ellie Aitkin’s smile is any guide, it looks like PM Malcolm Turnbull has her vote.

Aitkin and her fund manager hubby Charlie have just sold their Darling Point mansion for a bit over $10 million, but the deal is yet to settle so they are still on the books in Turnbull’s Wentworth.

Constituent Ellie caught up with the PM at dinner in the Great Hall on budget night last week.

The happy snaps were a good reminder that, while the head of trading at Aitkin’s eponymously named investment fund Aitkin Investment Michael Considine, may have left the team, the show will go on.

Considine — one of five, or 20 per cent of the innovative small business’s staff — is still to be replaced. We asked whether the departure was an exercise in cost-cutting. The response from AIM was, frankly, unpublishable.

We were told the fund is having its best month since it started last year amid much publicity about what we now understand was a $150 million potential investment by Kerry Stokes that was believed to be conditional on early fund performance. By November it emerged that the Stokes family would not co-invest.

The Ellie pic is the latest addition to perhaps the year’s most impressive photo diary, following earlier snaps with Russell Crowe, who was Ellie’s high-profile date at the most recent Oscars, buddying up to the equally fashionable Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, with whom she shared dinner last month at another party fundraiser.

Fairfax bloodbath

As Fairfax boss Greg Hywood told a media gathering yesterday: “No one likes redundancies.”

And, truly, the news coming out of the Sydney Pyrmont bunker and Melbourne’s Collins Street is gut-wrenching.

Journalists and artists with decades of experience at The Age, The Financial Review and The Sydney Morning Herald have been tapped on the shoulder after a call for nearly 100 voluntary redundancies fell short.

There are awful tales of reporters evading the sights of Sean Aylmer, one of Hywood’s executives charged with Grim Reaper duties. Dozens of other journalists have been given the news over the past two days that their redundancy applications have been approved.

Some will leave as early as this week.

The publisher’s more cynical staffers thought the timing of the cuts — along with news of a spin-off of its Kiwi assets with APN — looked like an exercise in performance benefit inflation for Hywood and his gang.

“There’s a reason these things are happening before June 30.”

Fairfax’s stock did shoot up 5 per cent on Monday. But yesterday it came back almost 2.5 per cent to 82c.

Seems even heartless investors don’t like this bloodbath.

Greenhill chief jets in

It’s not clear why investment bank Greenhill’s New York-based global chief Scott Bok was in Sydney yesterday.

The three-day trip Down Under — which we gather was on a commercial carrier rather than one of founder Bob Greenhill’s private jets — closely follows a set of annual results that showed the Australian division was in the red for the first time since entering the local market in 2010.

The big boss’s visit has led to speculation the visiting American was about to embark on further toe-cutting to get the outpost’s cost base down.

Discussion of Greenhill’s role in Slater & Gordon’s Quindell transaction was probably also on the agenda. The disastrous $1.2 billion transaction is now the subject of a Maurice Blackburn-led class action.

But others suggested Bok may simply be offering design advice for the mosaic jacuzzi under construction on the roof of Greenhill managing director Peter Wilson’s $5m Woolloomooloo renovation.

An inspection of that baroque construction more than justifies a trans-Pacific flight.

Tied up elsewhere

Who wouldn’t ditch a bunch of protesters at a super conference on a rainy Melbourne morning in favour of getting up close and personal with Ferrovial services boss Olivares Santiago?

And so it was for outgoing Broadspectrum chair Diane Smith-Gander, who eschewed the folk at Australian Council of Superannuation Investors and their ethical investment talk fest after being summoned to a meeting in windy Sydney with her new Spanish masters, including CEO Santiago.

Conference organisers thought Smith-Gander cancelled to go to Canberra and the detention centre protesters turned up anyway. That’s despite Ferrovial have declared they have no interest in running offshore refugee camps for Australia in the long term.

That could be good news for international prison operator Serco, which is mooted to be the party that could replace Broadspectrum for the $2.2 billion contract to run Australia’s detention centres on Manus and Nauru now that the Spanish want no part in it.

Once Broadspectrum folds into the European operator, Smith-Gander will be left with just one directorship at Wesfarmers along with her gig as president of the Chief Executive Women. Maybe she was asking Santiago for a job?