Silent No More is due to start on Monday night, running for three weeks at 8.30pm for 50 minutes, with the slot’s regular inhabitant, Four Corners, wrapping up for the year a fortnight ago.
An ABC spokesman assured us on Friday that the show would definitely proceed despite its well-known problems. But Diary hears internal program guides at Aunty still had the show marked as a “TBA” for most of last week, amid word that the ABC was forensically scanning every frame of the show for potential landmines.
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Additionally, through most of last week, all standard online TV guides, including Freeview, wrongly listed Australian Story as running for a whopping 77 minutes from 8.02 on Monday night, presumably because of confusion over Silent No More.
But with the show now getting a definitive green light, that error in the guides was corrected on Saturday. Promos for the program were running at the weekend.
Four Corners a host-free zone
Mike Willesee, Andrew Olle, Kerry O’Brien, Sarah Ferguson — they’re all names who have made or cemented their place in the national consciousness by hosting the ABC’s flagship current affairs program, Four Corners, during its 58-year history.
But Diary can now reveal that Ferguson, whose tenure ended this year, will now go down as Four Corners’ last-ever host.
Ever since Ferguson announced in February she was moving to China to become the ABC’s China bureau chief (taking her husband and Q&A host Tony Jones with her) there have been questions about who would front one of the ABC’s biggest shows in 2020.
Now the answer is clear: an empty chair.
It may just have something to do with the fact that costs need to be saved across the ABC. In the case of Four Corners, some nickels and dimes can be saved by simply going without a host. Diary hears that the overwhelming consensus at Aunty now is that it doesn’t need a studio anchor at the start of the show.
For a couple of weeks in February, after Ferguson stepped down, Four Corners reporter Michael Brissenden anchored the show. But since then, the reporter of the week simply has introduced the story via a piece to camera on location at the start of the episode.
The word is that the ABC is more than happy with how the one-year trial has gone.
That means the end of an era, as the host-less Four Corners now becomes permanent.
The decision to have no Four Corners host concludes the ABC’s biggest year of turnover of its marquee hosts in decades. Hamish Macdonald will take over Q&A from Jones next year, David Speers will succeed Barrie Cassidy on Insiders, while Lisa Millar has already replaced Virginia Trioli as ABC News Breakfast co-host.
News read-off
It’s the job that two axed Today show hosts want in 2020 but only one can have.
Diary is told it is Georgie Gardner, rather than Deb Knight, who is a warm favourite for the sought-after role of Nine’s 6pm Sydney weekend newsreader.
If Gardner were to get the gig, you’d have to feel for the versatile Knight. When she took up the role of Today host less than a year ago, she decided to work a six-day week by continuing with the Sydney 6pm newsreading gig, just for job insurance. Her explanation to colleagues? “It’s just in case hosting Today goes pear-shaped.”
But now things have indeed gone “pear-shaped”, will she actually keep the plum role? When we asked Nine’s news supremo, Darren Wick, at the weekend, he was very firm that “no decision” had yet been made. “We are not playing favourites,” he told us sternly.
Fair enough. But one thing is clear: for whichever ex-Today host ultimately misses out, it’s gotta hurt.
On the bright side for either Gardner or Knight, some other plum jobs have opened up in the past few weeks at Nine — such as joining David Campbell as co-host of either Weekend Today or Today Extra.
Crosby on Boris
Sir Lynton Crosby, British PM Boris Johnson’s Aussie strategy svengali for next month’s critical Brexit election, used a flying visit Down Under last week to shoot down suggestions Boris would win in a canter, Diary hears.
The London-based uber spin doctor took time out from the heat of the British campaign to jet in for the Christmas drinks of Crosby Textor, his eponymous political strategy firm, at Matt Moran’s Aria restaurant at Circular Quay in Sydney on Wednesday night.
Big bad Boris’s Conservatives are a prohibitive $1.50 favourite with the bookies to win an outright majority at the December 12 poll. But Sir Lynton dismissed talk that Johnson was already home and hosed: “We’re not complacent ahead of the election. Remember, at this point in the last campaign, we were further ahead than we are now in the polls, but the final result was very close.”
Still, Diary hears the mood at Aria was bullish, being CT’s first Christmas party since it had played a pivotal role in polling and strategy for Scott Morrison’s surprise May election victory here.
Sir Lynton’s presence at the function was a magnet for not one but two Australian PMs, Morrison and John Howard.
A host of media and political names were present, including man of the moment, ScoMo’s principal private secretary and former CT campaigning boss Yaron Finkelstein (fresh from his now-legendary Melbourne Cup run-in with Bill Shorten), Noel Pearson, Liberal president Nick Greiner, columnist Piers Akerman and one-time Nine reporter and later head of strategy to then NSW premier Mike Baird, Nigel Blunden.
Fittingly, it was Sir Lynton who had the night’s best zinger: “People often associate Crosby Textor with politicians. But we represent clients of high net worth, companies and countries — pretty much anything beginning with the letter ‘c’.”
No sharing Macdonald
Ten’s The Sunday Project will be forced to find a new male co-host for Lisa Wilkinson next year, with Hamish Macdonald forced by the ABC to give up the role, Diary has learned.
As first revealed in this column last month, Macdonald will next year take over the plum Q&A hosting gig at Aunty from Tony Jones, who is off to China.
But for Macdonald, there is a downside: a turf war. Diary understands that Macdonald’s new job means that the ABC will not let him continue his role on The Sunday Project.
Right up until we called last week, Ten was still publicly hopeful of hanging on to Macdonald for the role by talking the ABC into it. Ten’s executive director of news and current affairs, Peter Meakin, told us: “We’re largely reliant on the goodwill of the ABC if he’s going to continue with The Sunday Project.”
Meakin pointed out that the ABC allowing Macdonald to continue with Ten would be on a par with Ten making The Project’s Waleed Aly available for ABC shows like Offsiders and Australia Talks. “We have an amicable arrangement with the ABC in relation to Waleed,” he said.
But unfortunately for Macdonald, and Ten, Diary hears Aunty thinks he has too much on his plate at the ABC alone in 2020 to host The Sunday Project for Ten as well.
Next year Macdonald will have three jobs at the ABC: hosting Q&A, reporting for Foreign Correspondent and broadcasting with Radio National. That leaves little room, the ABC believes, for him to have a permanent hosting gig on The Project or The Sunday Project.
Diary hears that the best Macdonald can now hope for is to appear as a panellist on The Project from time to time.
Charged for farewell
It’s the show that brought us such memorable moments as last year’s $150,000 tell-all with Barnaby Joyce and Vikki Campion, and all the way back in 2014, the planned interview with Schapelle Corby that never was.
But after 11 years as Seven’s flagship current affairs show, the Melissa Doyle-hosted Sunday Night will now rest in peace with other long-lost Seven shows like Real Life, Face to Face and Witness in current affairs heaven.
Sadly, a valedictory episode of Sunday Night screened on Sunday night with little fanfare, after attracting just 331,000 viewers last week.
Meanwhile, Sunday’s in-house farewell to the show at the London Hotel in Sydney’s inner-city Paddington featuring on and off-air personalities was no more glamorous than its ratings.
The leaked invitation obtained by Diary shows staffers even had to purchase their own tickets to the event, which included a screening of Sunday Night’s last-ever episode.
Those who bought tickets faced strict rules on their attendance: “If you have any ill feelings towards colleagues or the show in general, please do not come. This event is for those that want to celebrate not condemn.”
Olympic backflip?
Could the ABC be about to have a change of heart on its decision to end its 67-year association with the Olympics, first revealed in this column a fortnight ago?
Diary hears a private council of war will take place on Wednesday at the ABC’s Ultimo bunker between Australia’s highest-ranking Olympic official and the chief figurehead of the ABC.
AOC boss John Coates will do his best to convince Ita Buttrose of the merits of covering Ash Barty and co’s quest for gold in Tokyo.
It is understood the ABC has not totally closed its mind to reconsidering axing the Olympics, but only if the numbers add up. As it now stands, the ABC says the cost of covering the Tokyo games on radio would be up to $1m.
From Aunty’s perspective, there are two key considerations. The first is whether Coates could persuade Kerry Stokes’s Seven Network, the 2020 Olympics rights-holder, to waive or cut the ABC’s asking price — believed to be about $300,000. The second is whether the ABC will be offered financial help, either by the government or the AOC, in providing the coverage as a public service.
Word out of the government seems pretty black and white at this point: it won’t provide a special one-off grant to help the ABC pay. So that just leaves Coates.
Is there a smart way for him to give the ABC some support to cover the Games?
When Diary caught Coates late last week, he wasn’t giving much away, except to say: “Unlike the ABC, I’m not publicly funded.”
Cheers for Beers
This one just has to win the award for the Australian media’s “Backflip of the Year” — and surely its shortest-lived redundancy. And at least some of it seems to be down to a rebellion by Melbourne’s two most influential broadcasters, Neil Mitchell and Ross Stevenson.
On October 30, a Macquarie Media press release issued by then-chairman Russell Tate shocked the Melbourne radio scene by revealing that 3AW’s popular operations manager, Stephen Beers, had been axed.
After the initial shock had died down, staff at the station started preparing for Beers’ farewell, scheduled for last Wednesday night. But 24 hours before Beers’ goodbye, there was an even more astonishing 3AW announcement — this time from new Macquarie Media boss Tom Malone. It could be summed up as: “Welcome back, Stephen Beers!”
What happened in those three weeks? In short, Macquarie’s new owners, Nine, decided life without Beers in Melbourne was impossible. His reinstatement was actively championed by 3AW’s biggest names, Mitchell and Stevenson, who apparently told Nine boss Hugh Marks that Beers’s axing was crazy, given his extensive knowledge of the Melbourne radio market. So now he’s back, this time in the evolved role of 3AW’s “station manager”.
All of which has proved a very costly exercise. Diary hears Nine had no choice but to honour the full and generous redundancy package paid to Beers when Tate was still chairman. It has now rehired Beers on a consultancy contract for two years.
That’s probably the least the highly regarded Beers deserves after the emotional rollercoaster of his past few weeks. Still, nice work if you can get it.
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