More on Sunrise executive producer Michael Pell and his well-publicised decision to exit the Seven Network’s lucrative breakfast program and head for Los Angeles.
Variously it was a “tough decision”, a “lucrative new opportunity” and so on.
After 11 years, Pell will leave the ratings juggernaut that is Sunrise and become the James Warburton-run outfit’s senior vice-president, entertainment content, North America.
In that gig, he’s liable to lounge around Los Angeles, soak up the sun and watch a few new programs to “discover and develop” new primetime projects, as TV Blackbox put it. Five stars.
But the departure was also in some way related to new career opportunities for another – significantly higher-profile – name in breakfast television: Piers Morgan.
Morgan’s team approached Pell to see if he’d come on board for Piers Morgan Uncensored, the new worldwide television program being developed after the former Fleet Street editor quit as host of Good Morning Britain and took up with News Corporation (the publisher of this masthead).
As part of the mega deal, Morgan will also be penning a column for The Sun, where he once worked, and the New York Post.
His show will appear on Sky News Australia and on Fox in the US.
Sources said the discussions with Pell were preliminary in nature and – as is now clear – didn’t proceed. Pell remains on a Seven Network contract in any case.
Pell was dispatched to Los Angeles because network executives had become irate or because they wanted to reward him with the good life, depending on who Margin Call asks.
Either way, Pell did not want to be drawn on the matter when contacted on Friday.
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ACA’s new top story
Over at Seven’s arch rival Nine, the rumour mill is abuzz with suggestions that there is likely to be a new executive producer at A Current Affair before too long.
The current EP is Fiona Dear, who was appointed to the job in December 2018 after a stint as the deputy director of news in Sydney. Dear has been on leave for several weeks, including through crucial ratings periods, leaving some in the building to wonder if she’ll return.
At the top of the pile to replace Dear is Amanda Paterson, the network’s Queensland news director. Paterson is a former ACA reporter who is known to be close to Nine’s director of news and current affairs, Darren Wick. Margin Call has it on good authority that she is not the most loved figure at ACA.
Robert ‘Carmo’ Carmody wanted the top job but Wick was not so enthused, one senior network executive quipped on Friday (after a few hours out on the tiles).
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Bar’s king and queen
After a pandemic-induced hiatus, it was back on for the legal industry’s finest at the Bench & Bar Dinner on Friday night.
The annual knees-up, thrown by the NSW Bar Association, is the night of nights for the profession.
This year, 2000 barristers, judges and assorted others crammed into the Hyatt-Regency to hear from Virginia Bell, the former High Court judge who finally hung up the jabot in February last year and presumably had a freer reign to speak than anytime since 1999 – when she was first appointed to the Supreme Court. Sadly, it is a strictly no media event.
For something a little more arcane, however, the Bench & Bar committee is also handing out a sort of prom king and queen number. Or, as they prefer, Mr Senior and Ms Junior.
Actually Helen Roberts, from the crown prosecutors’ chambers, was to be Ms Junior last year (and in 2020) before Covid-19 ended the festivities. Since then, she’s picked up an SC after a lengthy career in the trenches including the memorable prosecution of Comanchero figure Mick Hawi some years before his untimely death outside a Sydney gym in February 2018.
Then there’s Nicholas Owens SC, who will be crowned Mr Senior. Owens has had a big week, acting for Nine Entertainment in Ben Roberts-Smith’s defamation action against the publisher.
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Not as safe as houses
It’s becoming increasingly clear making millions in flogging suburban housing isn’t the guaranteed money spinner they tell you about in school.
Just ask former HWL Ebsworth client Gregory Lindsay-Owen, who is taking on his former lawyers and arguing they allowed him to be dudded out of an amount far more than the $56.9m he walked away with when he sold the family farm in 2014.
This came after an increasingly acrimonious relationship with Melbourne-based developer Villawood turned ugly enough that the home builder pulled the pin on the deal in 2014, forcing Lindsay-Owen to sell the family farm, walking away with millions less than he hoped.
But the court fight between Lindsay-Owen and HWL Ebsworth has raised a few curly questions about his relationship with Villawood and its senior managers: chief executive Alan Miller and executive directors Rory Costelloe and Tony Johnson.
Earlier this week Lindsay-Owen’s own barrister Todd Alexis SC noted his client “has a certain manner about him”. “One can perhaps consider that some people might have warmed to him naturally and others won’t,” he told NSW Supreme Court judge Ian Harrison.
Tim Faulkner SC, acting for HWL Ebsworth, said the failure of the deal showed it was not a guaranteed money spinner.
“The implicit assumption under the plaintiff’s case was it’s a licence to print money and anyone would be crazy to not go for it. Villawood actively chose not to go for it in 2014,” he said.
“For whatever their reason history shows these two parties could not work together. I’m not a psychologist, I don’t know why it became … toxic. One possibility is Mr Lindsay-Owen is a very suspicious person … another possibility is that (Villawood) were cheats and Mr Lindsay-Owen wasn’t going to stand for it.”
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Rob Scott was conspicuous by his absence as yet another of Wesfarmers’ dud investments was put to the sword but why he was schmoozing at the Davos world forum is a head scratcher.