A major announcement is brewing at Seven this week. Diary hears the force behind Sunrise’s unprecedented dominance of breakfast TV over more than 11 years, Michael Pell, is about to fly the Sunrise coop.
We’re told that Seven has offered Pell a lucrative new opportunity, based in Los Angeles, to source new programming out of the US for the network, both in terms of concepts that can be adapted for the Australian market, and finished productions. And Pell will no doubt be delighted at the prospect of no longer having to set his alarm for 4am.
The promotion of Pell will shake up the breakfast TV landscape currently dominated by David Koch and Natalie Barr.
In recent weeks, Sunrise has significantly widened its lead over the arch rival Today show, hosted by Karl Stefanovic and Allison Langdon.
A combination of the NSW and Queensland floods and the breakout of war in Ukraine appears to have seen viewers revert to Sunrise as their trusted source of breakfast TV information.
Since the start of the ratings year, Sunrise has achieved some of its best numbers in two years, amid the obvious surge of breaking news.
If Pell is indeed announced as heading to Hollywood in the next few days, expect him to only stay in the Sunrise role long enough for a brief handover, with April believed to be his most likely departing date from Australia.
The question is, how exactly will Seven fill Pell’s shoes?
We hear the most likely option is a restructure of how Sunrise will be run going forward.
One possibility, Diary is told, is that a single person could be appointed as Seven’s head of morning television, taking in Sunrise and The Morning Show, the latter of which is currently run by Sarah Stinson.
That could mean two people to replace Pell: one in the overarching morning TV boss role, and a separate person specifically running Sunrise. Watch this space.
Koch on Monday revealed he had tested positive to Covid-19 after Saturday night’s floods telethon.
“I tested negative on Saturday lunchtime ahead of the Australia Unites broadcast but then woke up feeling a bit shaggy on Sunday morning, which I initially put down to the late finish and sharing the bottle of red wine that Sylvia (Jeffreys) and Dr Chris (Brown) insisted we share (that’s my version and I’m sticking with it). But then I tested again and it came in positive. Symptoms are mild and I’m following the health orders.”
PM chooses Uhlmann over Speers
In Diary’s first column of 2022 back in January, we revealed that the Prime Minister Scott Morrison was planning an ABC interview blitz in February, supposedly to take in Leigh Sales on 7.30, David Speers on Insiders and Patricia Karvelas’s Radio National breakfast show.
“He’ll front up to nearly everything (on the ABC),” a senior government insider told us at the time. “He won’t be shying away from tough interviews. The list of people he won’t do interviews with is extremely small.”
The only definite “no-go” zone for an ABC interview, we were told, was a chat with 7.30’s chief political correspondent Laura Tingle.
There is, of course, no love lost between Tingle and the PM, because of numerous call-outs of the PM, including her now-famous deleted October 2020 tweet in which she personally trolled Morrison for “government ideological bastardry”.
But interviews with Sales, Speers and Karvelas in February were meant to be a reset for Morrison to start 2022, following the bruising commentary over the government’s handling of Covid-19 in 2021.
But we’re now in mid-March, and there has still been no sign of an interview with the ABC big three despite, we’re told, repeated requests. So much for his “ABC blitz”.
But what has really rubbed the ABC’s nose in it now is that at the same time Speers mustered a chat with opposition defence spokesman Brendan O’Connor on Insiders on Sunday morning, Morrison made the choice to front up for a major interview on rival show Weekend Today with Nine’s political editor, Chris Uhlmann.
There, Uhlmann got to ask Morrison the “elephant in the room” question that Speers and co would have loved to have put to the PM while he was talking to O’Connor: “Were you too slow to act on the floods in NSWand Queensland?”
We’re told the fact that it was Uhlmann who got the opportunity to ask the question went down like a lead balloon over at the ABC’s Ultimo HQ, where it was pointedly noted that Insiders routinely thrashes Weekend Today in the Sunday morning ratings.
For the record, in the Uhlmann interview, Morrison defended his response to the floods, saying that while he understood “the frustration” of the flood victims, “in a disaster like I have seen up in Lismore, no response is ever going to be able to meet the overwhelming need”.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison has been grilled LIVE on #9Today by political editor @CUhlmann over his handling of the flooding crisis.
— 9News Australia (@9NewsAUS) March 12, 2022
WATCH THE FULL INTERVIEW: https://t.co/jGaTaEbPaq#9Newspic.twitter.com/ce0WgzKcnl
Morrison also supported the response of the Australian Defence Force, claiming that “the first response always comes from the community, Chris. It always comes from the community, and then it comes from the SES, and then the ADF comes and supports that. But on the Monday, after the floods hit on the Sunday night, ADF were winching people off roofs and risking their own lives.”
Despite Morrison’s decision to go on with Uhlmann on Sunday, ABC sources say they remain “ready” and waiting for their own opportunity with the PM.
“Whenever the PM is ready to talk, we’ll be here,” one source ominously told Diary on Sunday.
But a government insider responded to the ABC late on Sunday: “We’ll get there when we get there.”
Ita’s praise for ‘brave’ Grace Tame
ABC chair Ita Buttrose has revealed she is a big fan of Grace Tame and Brittany Higgins, claiming their high-profile media advocacy has belatedly given women back a voice lost “since the 1960s and 1970s, when women’s lib was alive and well”.
Buttrose claims the pair have become crucial “role models” to which other women should aspire. “Brave women like Brittany Higgins and Grace Tame have spoken out – they’ve refused to be silenced,” she said in a low-key interview with the Ten Network’s morning show Studio 10 last week.
“They’ve really been great role models for other women. I think other women are looking at (them) thinking: ‘If they can do it, I can do it.’ And I think that’s been a very big step.”
The ABC chair’s open support came in a week that Tame continued to show no fear about attacking the very man who appointed Buttrose to her role as ABC chair: the PM Scott Morrison.
Tame told an Adelaide Writers’ Week panel last week that Morrison was “not authentic, to say the least” and “more concerned with maintaining power and control than running the country”.
Tame’s comments at the Adelaide Writer’s Week came weeks after remarks by the PM’s wife Jenny Morrison in an interview with Karl Stefanovic on 60 Minutes that Tame’s behaviour in refusing to smile at an Australian of the Year function in January was “disappointing”, and lacking in “manners and respect”.
But Buttrose has made the case on Studio 10 that the forthright approach of women like Tame and Higgins had provided crucial impetus for women to speak up: “Women have found their voice again,” she said. “And because we’ve found our voice again, I think it will be more encompassing of those women who feel they may have been left behind.”
Buttrose said that she had learnt throughout her media career that being a woman in a leadership position was all about winning “respect”, rather than popularity for its own sake.
“That’s really the important thing when you’re the boss,” she said. “It’s terrific if everybody likes you – but it’s not important. But they must respect you.”
Preston’s $1m a year deal ends
Going into 2020, Seven triumphantly announced that it had hired two of MasterChef Australia’s founding judges, Matt Preston and Gary Mehigan, to become arguably the network’s biggest new stars for that year.
But little more than two years after their much-heralded defections to Seven, Diary has learnt that the network’s contracts with both Preston and Mehigan have quietly lapsed without being renewed.
The first hint that Preston is a free agent once more came two weeks ago when he popped up with his mate, actor Lachy Hulme, on a rival network show, Celebrity Gogglebox, a Foxtel/Ten co-production.
And Seven didn’t get a lot of bang for the $1m-plus a year that it paid Preston and Mehigan – or $2m-plus over the course of their two-year contracts.
The pair recorded a grand total of one solitary show during the course of their time on the Seven payroll: the ill-fated Plate of Origin.
That show was excitedly promoted by Seven at the time as the “World Cup of Cooking”, in which home cooks of different cultural origins went up against each other. But so bad were the ratings, that Seven ended up having to combine the final two episodes into a marathon three-hour finale, just so the network could get rid of the show from its schedule.
Meanwhile, Preston and Mehigan didn’t agree to make special appearances on other Seven shows like Dancing with the Stars or SAS Australia, unlike fellow cooking judge Manu Feildel, a long-term Seven favourite who appeared on both reality shows. Being restricted to the cooking show genre seemingly left them on the outer at Seven.
So where to from here for Preston and Mehigan?
Insiders tell us that Seven still intends to work on projects with Preston, and that it remains possible he will appear on another show on the network’s screens in either 2022 or 2023. But there will be no repeat of his previous lucrative seven-figure deal with Seven, with any work he does at the network to be on a “project by project” basis.
Meanwhile, don’t expect to see Mehigan on Seven any time soon. Diary hears that while Preston remains on the menu in some form at Seven, Mehigan will have to cook up any new deals elsewhere.
Ferguson and Jones in Ukraine
Two of the ABC’s biggest names have headed to Ukraine to reinforce the public broadcaster’s ranks in the war zone.
Diary hears Sarah Ferguson and her equally high-profile husband, ex-Q+A host Tony Jones, drove into the Ukrainian capital Kyiv from Poland a week or so ago. We’re told they brought in tow a Ukrainian-speaking fixer, a security guard and a cameraman.
Ferguson (considered the internal favourite to take over 7.30 from Leigh Sales), and Jones are the first ABC on-air identities to be based in Kyiv since Russia invaded. However, the public broadcaster’s European bureau chief Steve Cannane had been in Kyiv for the ABC in the weeks leading up to the breakout of hostilities.
Ferguson, supported by Jones, is expected to file for Four Corners as early as next week. It’s clear that being based in the Ukrainian capital has had its fair share of pitfalls for media, with some big-name international reporters sidelined by unforeseen events.
Sky News UK’s chief correspondent, Stuart Ramsay, and his camera operator Richie Mockler were lucky to escape with their lives after being shot in an ambush by a saboteur Russian reconnaissance squad 30km from the centre of Kyiv.
Meanwhile, senior CBS foreign correspondent Charlie D’Agata dived for cover while live to air in a cross to the US from Kyiv after a massive bomb went off.
“This is what the war in Ukraine is about: the desperate degradation of the people inflicted by the Russian army.†@FergusonNews is on the ground for #4corners Corners in Irpin, 20 kilometres north-west of Kyiv. pic.twitter.com/zkVMKiLMoh
— Four Corners (@4corners) March 12, 2022
From the perspective of other Australian TV networks, Seven’s chief reporter Chris Reason has been based in Kyiv since near the start of the war. Reason had initially headed to London on February 20 when it was revealed the Queen contracted Covid-19, but quickly pivoted to the world’s biggest story when Russia invaded Ukraine a few days later.
At the start of the war, Nine’s European correspondent Carrie Anne Greenbank had been based in Kyiv, but the Nine base in the country has since moved to the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, close to the Polish border.
Fordham spruiks Hadley ‘25-year deal’
Ben Fordham, 2GB’s breakfast host, appears to be making a pitch to become a talent agent for his morning radio colleague, Ray Hadley.
Diary has learnt that Fordham, tongue firmly planted in cheek, stood up at a high-powered Nine gathering to celebrate Hadley in the company’s North Sydney boardroom last Tuesday to issue an order to Nine CEO Mike Sneesby.
“Ray Hadley needs to be signed up by 3.30 this afternoon to a 25-year contract,” Fordham instructed the Nine CEO.
Given that Hadley is currently paid $4m a year, that phantom 25-year deal would be worth $100m over the course of his proposed contract.
What made the deliberately outrageous demand all the more amusing was that Fordham famously comes from a family that runs one of the country’s biggest talent agencies.
The late John Fordham, Ben’s father, started The Fordham Company, which is these days run by the 2GB broadcaster’s brother, Nick Fordham – who represents some of Nine’s biggest past and present stars, including Lisa Wilkinson, Peter FitzSimons and Sylvia Jeffreys.
But Sneesby was quick to jokingly put his 2GB breakfast host in his place.
“I already have one Fordham to deal with on contracts – and I most certainly don’t need another,” the Nine CEO reportedly replied.
Decision to hire Lattouf ‘ill-informed’: ABC executive
Christopher Oliver-Taylor, who made the decision to sack Antoinette Lattouf, claims ‘sufficient background checks’ were not conducted before putting her on the air.
Aunty in race row with unionised staff
Hundreds of unionised ABC staff passed a resolution on Thursday demanding the national broadcaster acknowledge that Lebanese, Arab and Middle Eastern people can be subject to racial discrimination.