Hosting ABC News Breakfast more than chemistry

Don’t talk to Michael Rowland about his chemistry with ABC News Breakfast co-host Virginia Trioli | PODCAST

ABC News Breakfast’s Michael Rowland and Virginia Trioli. Picture: Stuart McEvoy.

Don’t talk to Michael Rowland about his chemistry with ABC News Breakfast co-host Virginia Trioli.

“I hate, I loathe this word chemistry. Absolutely hate it. I just think it’s pretty artificial,” Rowland tells The Australian’s Behind The Media podcast.

“I just prefer to talk about us having a very solid, workable TV relationship, and it has taken time, as it does with any presenting partnership, for me to ­become comfortable with Virginia. Ditto her with me.

“We joke that we are a married couple. We spend 15 hours (a week) of live TV together on air.”

ABC News Breakfast celebrates 10 years on air this week, and viewers have been invited to a celebratory live three-hour broadcast on Melbourne’s Southbank on Friday.

And while Rowland appears a natural fit for the program, he only joined it in 2010 after a varied reporting career that included federal parliament, business and finance rounds and a stint as US correspondent covering the election of Barack Obama and the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre.

Adjusting to the breakfast style was difficult, he says. “You need to be, for want of a better ­expression, provocative, where you need to go outside your journalistic comfort zone and express an opinion on something.”

Rowland was the first ABC journalist to interview acting ABC managing director David Anderson after Michelle Guthrie was sacked last month.

“(The fact) everybody in the ABC was going to be watching that interview did impose a bit of pressure on me. But also you’re obligated as well, as a journalist, to ask the tough questions. I think lots of my colleagues at the ABC are still scratching their heads trying to work out what happened. We haven’t got the full answers.”

He calls for “a bit of stability”. “I think the ABC board has to choose the next managing director very carefully. I would not do it in a pink fit.”

The early years of ABC News Breakfast, which Trioli co-hosted with Insiders’ Barrie Cassidy, was a blur of technical disasters. ABC correspondent Peter Lloyd was slated to be the original co-host but he was sensationally arrested on drugs charges in Singapore and Cassidy, already hosting ­Insiders, heroically stepped in. ABC News Channel’s Joe O’Brien co-hosted on Fridays.

“The 2.30am alarm is never comfortable,” says Trioli, who was there from day one when the program was shown on digital channel ABC2 and barely troubled the ratings.

“Never turn down the opportunity to be the foundation presenter of something new if your corporation is backing it. There was a lot of cynicism and poo-pooing within this corporation from various people, but I felt ­totally inured to that because I loved the idea of that so much.

“I remember sheer bloody terrors. We were pioneering everything. We were bunnies and guinea pigs trialling the new robot camera system and new ­automated studios. Directors and producer and us presenters had never used this stuff before.”

Trioli and Cassidy were on air when gossip website TMZ broke the news of Michael Jackson’s death in 2009. Trioli recalls: “Barrie said, ‘I know positively zero about Michael Jackson’, but he had to ab lib and freewheel with me for about two hours about the life of Michael.”

Rowland says the program is built around 15-minute bursts and maximum variety is called for. “In the last week, for instance, I’ve ­interviewed everybody from the Prime Minister to Joel Edgerton,” he says.

For Trioli, the formula for a news breakfast program is simple. “When people wake up they want to know is the world safe, what is the weather and give me something I can go to work with that makes me sound funny and connected and in touch and smart.”

Trioli this year has hosted Q&A and 7.30 on a stand-in basis and filled in for Melbourne Mornings presenter Jon Faine for two weeks.

But she says she is “absolutely committed” to remaining on ABC News Breakfast next year. “I’m so proud of a show that we built from a standing start.”