In the process, her message became a cautionary tale about well-known media identities using Twitter perhaps a bit more than they should.
It all started on Friday morning. Fresh from the news the night before from Dan Andrews that Melbourne was going into yet another lockdown, she put out a tweet just before her show including a selfie from the ABC’s Melbourne studios that showed Trioli and her assembled production team gathered together and wearing blindingly sparkly outfits.
“We bringing sparkles,” she posted brightly. “Don’t make #lockdownsix drab – try to find some joy. @abcmelbourne”.
We bringing sparkles.
— Virginia Trioli (@LaTrioli) August 5, 2021
Don’t make #lockdownsix drab - try to find some joy. 💥 â¦@abcmelbourneâ© pic.twitter.com/fKHBXHK27t
Diary is told the idea originated in a private WhatsApp chat the night before when one of her producers innocently suggested all staff on the program should dress in sparkles to raise the mood.
But it would have taken an optimistic Melburnian to describe the city’s mood on Friday morning as sparkly, apart perhaps from essential ABC workers whose day-to-day working habits and incomes haven’t been affected during a pandemic when most Melburnians are in stark isolation.
A member of the Twitterati, Susie, responded: “Virginia my kid is crying. I don’t care about sparkles,” prompting Trioli to reply: “I’m so sorry Susie.”
But still the sparkly tweet stayed up, prompting a torrent of responses. While some loyal fans welcomed the sparkles, others saw them as tone deaf. One respondent posted: “Virginia, thanks for rubbing in that lockdowns are only for the great unwashed and that urban elites are exempt from the dictates to stay at home.” Another cuttingly tweeted: “No it’s super important for them to be in the office together so they can think about ways to tweet about how bad it is that Bunnings is open.”
Ouch.
ABC bosses like David Anderson and Gaven Morris have been openly imploring Aunty’s staff this year to be judicious in their use of social media – but it seems that message is still struggling to get through.
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It might kill me: Barry’s cycling prang
Cycling is one of the only legal ways to escape lockdown land these days for “exercise”. But Paul Barry has now found even that seemingly healthy activity can sometimes be a health hazard.
The Media Watch host went from dissecting the news to making his own headlines, after on Friday coming off second best in a close encounter with a car backing out of a driveway in Randwick in inner-city Sydney while he was riding into work at the ABC’s Ultimo headquarters.
Barry spent Friday night in hospital with a broken pelvis and a broken hand, before spending the weekend recuperating at home.
The Media Watch host confided to Diary from his sick bed on Sunday that he now expected to be off the show for up to a month.
“I can’t really walk at the moment,” he told us.
“It depends how long it takes me to get back on my feet. It’ll be a maximum of four weeks, but I hope to get back within four.”
The ABC’s trusty Sydney weekend newsreader Jeremy Fernandez will take on his most challenging role yet in the Media Watch chair on Monday night.
Media Watch executive producer Tim Latham is canvassing options for a “longer term fill in” beyond this week’s show if it’s needed.
Barry says the accident happened when the driver was backing out of a driveway.
“I was going about 30km/h, and the driver backed out straight in front of me. By that time, I had, I would think, about half a second warning. I swerved, but was unable to avoid the car and smashed against the back of it.”
In the immediate aftermath of the accident on Saturday, Barry had tweeted a “thoughtless driver backed into the road without looking and cleaned me up on my bike as I rode to work”.
Thanks Jeremy. Break A Leg, as they say in showbiz. or, actually, maybe not. good luck! https://t.co/AJA3xDzMeL
— Paul Barry (@TheRealPBarry) August 8, 2021
But on Sunday, he was in a more sanguine mood, telling Diary: “The driver was reversing past a car parked up right against her driveway, so it was hard for her to see. She shouldn’t feel too bad about it … I don’t bear her any grudge.”
And lest you think the accident will turn Barry off either cycling or Media Watch, think again.
“It might kill me one day, but I really like riding,” he said. “And I have no plans to retire.”
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Kenny: I’ll host Media Watch for free
If Media Watch has any problems finding a new host internally to host the show while Paul Barry is indisposed, Sky’s Chris Kenny has an unbeatable offer: he’ll do it for nothing.
“Seriously, I wish Paul the very best for a speedy recovery,” Kenny tells Diary. “But in the interests of saving taxpayers money in the meantime, I am willing to fill in for a few weeks, gratis.”
Over to you, David Anderson.
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Dick declares Queensland its own country
If ever you needed confirmation Australia has become six colonies and two territories rather than a single, unified country in the era of Covid-19, Queensland Treasurer Cameron Dick provided it last week on Twitter.
Not content with merely taking pot shots at other states about their handling of the pandemic, Dick made the bold decision on Thursday to feature Queensland as a separate entity on the medal tally for the Tokyo Olympics. Clearly, while the cat’s away, the mice will play. With Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk still in hotel quarantine at that point, Dick (who we’re told, along with deputy premier Steven Miles, fancies himself as the heir apparent to Palaszczuk’s throne) was not averse to grandiosely putting Queensland above some European sporting superpowers.
“#QLD sits in 8th place on the medal tally, above Italy and France,” he proudly noted on Twitter.
#QLD sits in 8th place on the medal tally, above Italy and France 💪 https://t.co/h85OspSw62
— Cameron Dick (@camerondickqld) August 5, 2021
He also re-tweeted someone else’s medal table showing Queensland dominating those grossly inferior southern and western states as well. At that point, the table claimed Queensland had eight gold medals, compared with NSW (which the table weirdly suggested had 4.5 golds), Victoria, Tasmania and WA (one gold each) and South Australia (no golds).
With the Queensland government now repeatedly identifying its constituents as Queenslanders first, Australians second; WA seemingly wanting to build a border wall with the rest of the country (akin to Donald Trump’s wall with Mexico), and Dan Andrews chucking bombs at Gladys Berejiklian, it’s clear that chaos rules with the colonies.
So are we “one and free”, as the updated lyrics of Advance Australia Fair suggest – or a disunited colonial rabble?
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Gladys and ScoMo spinners’ robust phone call
We noted last week the NSW lockdowns have been causing increasing tensions between Victoria’s Dan Andrews and NSW’s Gladys Berejiklian on how the respective premiers have handled Covid-19.
But now Diary can reveal there was a “robust” phone call between the Liberal Party’s two most powerful media spinners at state and federal level: Andrew Carswell, the media chief for PM Scott Morrison, and Sean Berry, Berejiklian’s head of media.
What makes it more interesting is the pair are friends and drinking pals going back five years to their days as journalists, when Carswell was chief of staff at The Daily Telegraph and Berry was Seven’s political editor.
The friendship developed when in 2016, Berry’s wife Miranda Wood became Carswell’s close newsroom partner as the Telegraph’s head of news.
But things clearly weren’t so friendly in a phone call late last month between Carswell in Canberra and Berry in Sydney, although the two sides’ versions of events vary.
From its end, the Prime Minister’s office wasn’t happy about the perceived habit of some NSW ministers to brief against the PM’s handling of the pandemic and the much-discussed vaccine rollout.
Sources claim there was feedback from some reporters that they had been privately briefed by at least two NSW ministers. “Your ministers need to stop briefing,” is one version of what Carswell told Berry.
NSW government insiders have remained tight-lipped on the tensions. But Diary understands there was a concern at state level that the PMO might have itself been briefing Sydney press gallery journalists against Berejiklian’s handling of the current Delta outbreak, allegedly starting with claims she had initially refused to accept an offer of Australian Defence Force troops to assist.
And what of the suggestion made last week by the Nine newspapers’ Niki Savva that there had been a “blazing row” between the PMO and Berejiklian’s office?
Both state and federal sources are playing that down, instead using the euphemistic r-word, robust, to describe the call between Carswell and Berry.
A NSW government source says: “It was a robust conversation involving two super-high pressure environments in a pandemic …(Berry is) fond of Carsy.”
On that point, at least, the two sides are in furious agreement.
A federal government source says: “(They’re) good mates. The job is robust.”
Robust it is, then.
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Guthrie and Holgate: millions for no ‘sorry’
If you can’t get an apology, a seven-figure settlement will just have to do.
That seems to have been the motto in the remarkably similar financial terms reached in the departures of the two trailblazing female bosses of enterprises in the government’s communications portfolio, Michelle Guthrie and Christine Holgate.
When it was revealed in 2019 that Guthrie was paid $1.64m to finalise her departure from the ABC after she was abruptly sacked by then-chair Justin Milne, she said it was “never about the money”, but because what was done to her was “wrong”.
Diary hears Guthrie had unsuccessfully sought an apology from the ABC for her departure in lieu of compensation.
Similarly, Holgate said when she resigned she was “not seeking any financial compensation” from Australia Post.
She also told Seven’s Sunrise in May she was waiting for the Australia Post board to “pick up the phone and say that they are sorry”.
But there is a common theme in the departures of Guthrie and Holgate: “sorry” indeed seems to be the hardest word.
With no apology on the table for her either, Holgate followed the Guthrie route and took $1m of cold hard taxpayer cash instead.
You can’t blame Guthrie or Holgate for pocketing seven-figure settlements after their forced departures.
It’s just a pity some form of pride at the ABC and Australia Post in not saying sorry has hit us in the hip pocket.
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Hendo: Who wrote that shit?
His signature line at the end of thousands of news bulletins may have been: “That’s the way it is”.
But off air, the best-known line of Brian “Hendo” Henderson, universally loved initially as Bandstand host and later as one of the news industry’s great gentlemen, was far more colloquial.
“Who wrote that shit?!,” was Hendo’s habitual laughing off-air refrain to his closest newsroom staff over decades.
Whoever wrote the script for the story closest to a commercial break would be on guard for the signature tongue-in-cheek gobful from a smiling Hendo during the ads, after the likes of a trivial story about a family of ducks or a Royal Easter Show showbag review.
Diary is told the line never failed to lighten the mood amid the pressure of putting to air what was, for more than 40 years, Sydney’s most-watched news bulletin.
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Doyle’s revenge on Seven with Nine jail show
It was bound to happen. The much-loved former host of Sunrise, Melissa Doyle – axed by Seven amid an outpouring of public support nearly a year ago – is about to show up on the rival Nine network.
Diary is reliably informed Doyle will be host and narrator of a new Nine show named Australia Behind Bars, which will screen in the next few months.
Details are being kept tight, but it was filmed, pre-lockdown, in three NSW prisons: Dillwynia and Silverwater jails in Sydney’s west, and Wellington jail near Dubbo.
We’re told it will even look in depth at the impact of Covid-19 on correctional facilities, with each fresh prisoner forced to spend two weeks in a “quarantine” cell to protect the general jail population. That will be interesting, given a coronavirus case involving a new prisoner at Silverwater jail made headlines last week.
Doyle beat out a hot field of contenders to narrate the ITV-made show, with 60 Minutes reporter Sarah Abo and even legendary 78-year old former Prisoner star Val Lehman rumoured to have been discussed for the role.
Ultimately, however, the temptation for Nine to rub Seven’s nose in it by hiring Doyle, who fronted everything from Today Tonight to Sunday Night, Sunrise and various news bulletins in her 25 years with the network, was just too great.
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PVO’s surprise greeting by Hamish at ABC
It seems the ABC might need a refresher on who exactly works for them. Ten political editor Peter van Onselen turned up at ABC national headquarters in Ultimo on Sunday for one of his appearances as a panellist on David Speers’ Insiders only to be greeted at security by the beaming face of returning Ten colleague, and departed Q+A host, Hamish Macdonald.
The check-in tablet on entry to Ultimo carried the greeting: “Welcome to ABC Ultimo”, featuring Macdonald proudly standing in front of the Q+A set.
As we revealed last month, of course, Macdonald is taking over hosting duties from PVO on the Sunday and Friday editions of The Project, after ditching Q+A.
But PVO couldn’t resist snapping off a photo of his successor at The Project (with, it has to be said, a slightly-suspicious looking ABC security guard looking on at its empty Sydney headquarters) and sending it the way of your bleary-eyed diarist on Sunday morning.
PVO wryly tells us: “Hamish is very photogenic, so I can understand why the ABC wants to use him. But they should be using The Project logo, because he’s ours now.”
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Making the news
Clemenger Group CEO steps down as buyout deal looms
Clemenger Group CEO Les Timar is the latest executive to depart the business as it prepares to be bought out by BBDO Worldwide and Omnicom.
Failed experiment: Kyle and Jackie ‘O’ hit rock bottom in Melbourne
The parachuting of controversial Sydney radio duo Kyle Sandilands and Jackie ‘O’ Henderson into the Melbourne appears doomed.
Spare a thought for Virginia Trioli. A well-intentioned attempt by the host of Q+A and ABC Radio Melbourne mornings to cheer up weary Melburnians stuck in the city’s Lockdown 6.0 ended up seeing her trolled by even her traditional fan base.