Daniel Andrews’s hair-trigger approach to locking down Victoria at the slightest provocation may be winning him the Newspoll vote — but on the downside, it’s losing him some big-name TV shows.
Diary has learnt that some of the country’s most prominent productions, most notably Ten’s high-rating The Masked Singer and Nine’s Australian Ninja Warrior — worth millions of dollars and hundreds of production jobs to the Victorian economy — have quietly abandoned Melbourne. And we’ve established that a growing part of the networks’ thinking in ditching Melbourne is that they’re worried about unforeseen financial blowouts, because of the potential for more rolling lockdowns in Victoria.
But the loss for “Lockdown Dan” is arch rival Gladys Berejiklian’s gain. Ten’s marquee host, Osher Gunsberg, confirms to Diary that The Masked Singer is moving to Sydney in 2021 and he is “excited” by the move after a challenging 2020 season in Melbourne. Meanwhile, Ninja Warrior, hosted by Ben Fordham and Rebecca Maddern, will also be made in the Harbour City, without the need for as much as a single cent of production incentives from Gladys.
Sources at Nine, Ten and big production houses privately acknowledge the greater certainty provided by Gladys’s policy of keeping the economy open as much as possible while managing COVID-19 outbreaks helped Sydney’s cause.
Andrews last week threw a bone to Victorians by ending the state’s third lockdown after five days.
But it was too late for a weary TV production industry that had a particularly tough time in Melbourne during last year’s marathon lockdown.
As one network source puts it: “With many productions unable to get COVID-19 insurance, constant lockdowns can become a significant financial issue.”
Departed Endemol Shine boss Carl Fennessy — one of the country’s top producers (who incidentally was tight-lipped about his mooted status as a contender for the Nine CEO job) — told Diary that NSW presents obvious advantages.
“If the choice had to be made right now, you’d have far more confidence that NSW would ride out an outbreak than the other states. It’s very costly to be pressing pause buttons with expensive productions.”
The Masked Singer had a particularly gruelling 2020 experience in Melbourne, with stars like Jackie O, Gunsberg, Urzila Carlson and Dannii Minogue forced to endure many weeks of lockdowns that ultimately risked the entire production.
Diary hears much of The Masked Singer cast spoke up against filming in Melbourne for the 2021 season, with production due to start in July.
Last August, a frustrated Jackie O vented on air during the 2020 season: “My life is f..ked … I can’t get out of Melbourne. I am going to be stuck here for the rest of my life.”
Meanwhile, Gunsberg missed out on his first Father’s Day and his son’s first birthday amid Victoria’s second lockdown and a COVID outbreak on the show.
When Diary reached him last week, Osher was clearly thrilled to reveal the 2021 production was moving to the Harbour City: “I’m so excited to return to Sydney. Our time in Melbourne was unexpectedly adventurous as it included two weeks of unplanned intense indoor live-streamed cycling due to a COVID quarantine order.”
Meanwhile, another Dan lockdown announcement 10 days ago sent big Nine productions, including Ninja Warrior, Married At First Sight and Beauty and the Geek yet again scrambling to change plans with less than 24 hours’ notice. Several Melbourne-based contestants and staff on all three shows were rushed into isolation in Sydney to beat the lockdowns. “Ninja and Beauty aren’t even being made yet, but we had to get them out for production certainty,” a Nine source told Diary.
Sounds like all the financial sweeteners in the world won’t lure shows like Ninja Warrior or The Masked Singer back to Melbourne, until Dan learns to live without lockdowns.
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Trioli on a ‘roll’
Did ABC Radio Melbourne morning host Virginia Trioli really mean one line last week to come out quite as it did about Dylan Alcott, Australia’s 12-time grand slam champion in wheelchair tennis?
After replaying the segment from Trioli’s Wednesday morning show a couple of times, Diary reckons probably not.
After Trioli played her audience an excerpt of the larrikin Alcott delivering a trademark one-liner on the day he won his seventh consecutive Australian Open, she came out with what sounded like an unintended double entendre about the wheelchair tennis champion.
“I love how this man rolls, I seriously do,” Trioli confided to some rather surprised ABC774 listeners.
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#MeToo, part 2 for ABC’s Milligan?
Is the ABC’s Four Corners planning a sequel to its most talked-about episode of 2020, Louise Milligan’s “Inside the Canberra Bubble”, her #MeToo episode about alleged inappropriate behaviour in Parliament House?
Right up until last Monday, Diary would have said definitely not, after we were told unequivocally out of the ABC bunker that there were no plans for a second instalment.
But as Milligan herself tweeted last week: “A week’s a long time in politics.”
It sure is. Last Monday, Sam Maiden of news.com.au broke the news of ex-Liberal staffer Brittany Higgins’s rape allegations against a male colleague in Defence Minister Linda Reynolds’ office — and it would be fair to say the story piqued Milligan’s considerable interest.
Milligan put out many tweets last week that referenced Brittany Higgins in the context of her original Four Corners story that, as she noted, had started the ball rolling on revealing a “toxic culture for women in parliament”. She even turned up on Ten’s The Project to ask “serious questions” about what the PM knew on Higgins at the time Inside the Canberra Bubble screened, and tweeted proposed questions for MPs to ask of Scott Morrison on the matter.
Milligan’s original story last year alleged that inappropriate workplace relations in Parliament House in Canberra were rife, in a story that focused on government frontbenchers Christian Porter and Alan Tudge.
But it triggered a storm of protest in November last year from the Coalition, which claimed it focused primarily on one side of politics. Angry government staffers even contacted ABC board members in the lead-up to the story’s screening.
By the end of 2020, Milligan sent the Canberra rumour mill into overdrive about a possible sequel, when she tweeted that she had “new info” generated by the November story that she was “methodically going through”.
Diary is also reliably informed that the ABC switchboard ran hot with tales of alleged bad behaviour from both sides of the political spectrum on November 9, the night Inside the Canberra Bubble screened.
The sequel talk had died down before last Monday. But will Milligan and Four Corners now be motivated by the Brittany Higgins affair to return to the subject of politicians behaving badly, we asked the ABC? A spokeswoman replied: “We don’t comment on stories Four Corners may or may not be working on.”
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AFR’s Chook flies the coop
Alert readers of the Australian Financial Review grappling with the complexities of the February profit reporting season have been stressing out about the recent absence from the AFR’s pages of Tony Boyd, who writes the paper’s flagship back-page business analysis column, Chanticleer (colloquially known as the “Chook”).
The normally ever-present Boyd has strangely been missing for most of profit month: leaving the Fin Review faithful without the benefit of his final judgments on whether the recoveries of various corporates from a year of COVID-19 are a boom or a bust.
At AFR readers’ urging, we rang the Chook himself to make sure all was well. Turns out he was holidaying near Canberra (!) after being granted a rare leave pass from his bosses to miss much of the profit season. “I had a couple of weddings to attend this month, so I thought I may as well work through the Christmas break and take some time off later,” Boyd confides.
Self-described “Junior Chook” James Thomson has taken up temporary residence on Boyd’s perch in his absence.
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O’Keefe situation ‘fluid’ as Seven waits
It’s looking increasingly like Seven is leaning towards ditching a whole stash of episodes of The Chase that it made with troubled star Andrew O’Keefe, Diary hears.
With formal confirmation that Larry Emdur will take over as the show’s new host, the common wisdom around Seven is that it may now try to ease O’Keefe into the show’s past as quickly as possible.
We’re told the first Emdur episodes will be filmed in the last fortnight of March. The problem Seven is still grappling with is how soon to start screening them.
The trouble for the network is that it has a particularly large stash of O’Keefe episodes in the can. Because of COVID-19 and its risks to filming last year, Seven thought it prudent to make many months of episodes just in case.
Under normal circumstances in TV-land, it would be considered silly to waste them — given the high cost of production.
But in O’Keefe’s case, how many will actually screen? Sources on Sunday described the situation as “fluid”. Diary reckons that “fluidity” may be down to the optics of how O’Keefe emerges from the next stage of proceedings on charges he assaulted his partner, Orly Lavee.
If Seven does dump a stash of O’Keefe episodes, as seems most likely, there is another question: will contestants who won prize money on The Chase still be paid?
Not necessarily, at least by the letter of the law.
As we noted a few weeks back, the fine print of TV game show contracts means networks are only required to pay contestants if episodes actually air.
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Sales tackles Twitter mob over bias claims
The ABC’s Leigh Sales has copped an epic Twitter pile-on from the #IStandWithDan crowd for having the gall to ask Dan Andrews pertinent questions.
The 7.30 host dared to turn up at the Victorian Premier’s press conference last Monday to ask whether he had a “lack of confidence” in the state’s contact tracing, given “you apparently can’t manage two to three cases of Covid a day in a population of about 6.3 million people”.
Surely a fair question in the midst of Victoria’s third lockdown, particularly after Andrews had knocked back 7.30’s repeated requests for an interview.
But Sales suffered a backlash that has perhaps only been rivalled by the vitriol experienced throughout the pandemic by Rachel Baxendale, The Australian’s Victorian political reporter. Among various expletives, Sales has been described as being on the LNP payroll, of offering “show pony performance journalism”, and of “hijacking” the press conference.
She was falsely accused of travelling to Melbourne purely to embarrass the Victorian Premier. In reality, she was stuck in Melbourne precisely because of Dan’s lockdown, after attending a friend’s birthday.
But amid the pile-on, there was one courageous non-ABC tweeter who gave as good as Sales got. Nine’s fearless political editor, Chris Uhlmann, nonchalantly braved the Twitter furnace by posting: “My good friend @leighsales proves, yet again, that she is one of the best journalists in Australia. And, on cue, the ferocious few on Twitter rage on their tiny stage with all the wit of a school bully. #thisisnotjournalismyoutools”.
After posting a grateful “thank you” to Uhlmann — who copped his own battering for his troubles — Sales made it clear to “the conspiracy theorists who are still babbling away” that she has given the same treatment to leaders from the opposite side of politics.
Diary’s trawl through her years as 7.30 host shows confirms this. She has shown up at press conferences for numerous senior figures from all ends of the political spectrum after they had declined studio interviews.
Here’s a blast from the past for the conspiracy theorists who are still babbling away- Journalist Shows Up At Press Conference To Ask Basic Questions of Powerful Figure Who Declines Studio Interview (and yes I was 7.30 Anchor at this time too). https://t.co/b6etMWva8Q
— Leigh Sales (@leighsales) February 17, 2021
They include Prime Minister Scott Morrison and his Liberal predecessor Tony Abbott, former Labor senator Sam Dastyari and Cardinal George Pell.
Makes the Dan fanatics’ claims of supposed pro-Liberal bias by Sales look rather silly.
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Mitchell won’t attend Premier’s ‘show’
One media figure who definitely won’t be turning up to a Dan Andrews press conference anytime soon is 3AW’s morning king and resident curmudgeon, Neil Mitchell.
Hosts like Sky’s Peta Credlin, and the ABC’s Leigh Sales and Raf Epstein have all shown up to Dan pressers because they have been knocked back for interviews.
But Mitchell won’t be following their leads. “I’d be demeaning myself,” he argues. “You cannot cross-examine someone properly in that environment. He uses the podium to put up a wall to the media.”
Mitchell believes Andrews’s podium “puts him in control” of the media.
“He’s MC of his own show,” he says. “Whether you’re Leigh Sales or me or someone else cross-examining him, he can say: ‘I’ll take another question.’ That’s something he wouldn’t be able to do in a studio interview, where it’s one-on-one.”
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Facebook’s Hunter turns hunted
Spare a thought for Andrew Hunter, allegedly Facebook’s Australian head of “news partnerships”. After the company’s actions to ban Australian news from its platform early Thursday morning, it doesn’t seem there’s much partnering left for Hunter to do.
Diary hears that Hunter — who has also worked for both News Corp and Nine — had been holding what seemed to be productive meetings with local news organisations for half of last week. Then something changed radically — with Facebook’s incendiary decision apparently coming out of the US from no less than Mark Zuckerberg, some time overnight on Wednesday night.
A former Facebook CEO says the Australian news ban represents an act of war and is a move Mark Zuckerberg may regret. https://t.co/JfJ85FLY9d
— The Australian (@australian) February 18, 2021
That didn’t stop media groups from hunting down Hunter to make their disapproval known, and to get non-news media websites reinstated. Some, like NITV, Gardening Australia and ABC Kids — which all have zero to do with news — had their posts disappear from the platform, as of course did health, emergency and weather sites.
Unsurprisingly, we’re told Thursday was a busy day for Hunter at Facebook’s Barangaroo bunker in Sydney, with a succession of Australian media execs making a beeline for his office.
Meanwhile, the news sites of everyone from Nine to News Corp and the ABC turned to, of all places, Instagram to keep their audiences aware of how to find them without Facebook.
The irony of this move was lost on no one. Instagram, of course, is owned by Facebook. Strange times indeed.
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